Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Anakin Falls on the battlefield, on a small dusty planet in the Mid Rim that’s largely unimportant in the grand scale of the war.  His men are dying in scores around him, screaming, spilling their guts onto the pockmarked ground, and something that has been pulling tighter and tighter over the course of the war, over the course of his whole life—between one decapitated droid and the next, something snaps in his chest.

All of a sudden, the Force is accessible to him in ways that were never truly obvious before, and instinct and adrenaline instantly seize upon them.  All of a sudden, he’s moving faster and more fluidly than ever, cutting through the opposing forces like air instead of butter.  A downed GAR tank shudders and rights itself behind him.  Half a klick away, the rubble of a collapsing cliffside becomes light as a feather and drifts to the ground around the cohort it was about to bury under five tons of rock.  A shiny reaches up and gently bats a boulder aside, watching in wonder as it floats out of reach.

Yes, Anakin Falls for the first time on a relatively insignificant battlefield in the middle of the war, more than a year earlier than Sidious was planning.  And he doesn’t notice.

Well, why should he?  He has a number of other things to focus on.  He has to stay alive, for one thing, sunk so deep in the Force that he barely remembers his own name in order to feel blaster bolts coming before they’re fired.  He’s equally high on adrenaline.  He’s currently decimating an enemy detachment from within while his men engage it from the front, so he has to stab that droid, and roll left to avoid Fives’ fire, and come up under this one with a sweeping underhand slash, and switch his grip to backhand to stab the one behind him through the processor, and then use that movement to propel him into a rightward spin so he can charge the next before it can turn back to him.  In one corner of his brain, as always, he’s worried about Ahsoka back at the Temple, and Obi-Wan currently en route to a tough campaign near Hoth.  He has a pebble in one boot and a pain in his back where he’s pulled a muscle, he has a small, persistent headache from lack of sleep and dehydration, and he can still feel troopers’ lives winking out in the Force (although, for some reason, much slower than they were a minute ago).

So yes, Anakin doesn’t notice that he’s Fallen, just that X and Y and Z need doing and he’s multitasking a bit better than usual.  The 501st notices, as all over the battlefield small emergencies are invisibly handled with more power and at greater distances than they’re used to.  Not enough that anyone can relax, but enough that it compounds over the next few standard hours and the battle turns in their favor much faster than it otherwise might have.  The 501st, on the whole, is glad for the change, but they don’t think it all that unusual.  The eyes thing is a bit more out of the ordinary, but shocking as it may seem, one doesn’t spend a lot of time staring deeply into one’s commanders’ eyes mid-fight.  Of the small unit fighting with the General on the north flank, a handful notice the glowing yellow eyes and take a nanosecond to reflect, “That’s new,” but they all just kind of assume it’s a Jedi thing and move on with their day.  The sun is hot, this armor is heavy, what I wouldn’t give for a shower right now.

Before dusk falls completely, there are no droids left operational on this barren flood plain on this tiny planet.  The first of a series of half-built airbases meant to disrupt key Republic supply lines is now smoldering rubble.  It’s another two grueling hours before Anakin has finished with cleanup, helping securely float the wounded back to the triage unit (they feel lighter today—he’s not so tired, he supposes—so he lifts a few more than usual and misses the med team’s curious stares).  Purely by chance, he manages to dodge Rex and the other few troopers who’ve been up close and personal with a Sith until the glow has faded significantly.  It’s another hour and a half before he’s done enough organizing and ordering and delegating to Rex that he can finally head to the refresher to wash the dirt-encrusted blood off his hands.  By then, darkness has fallen and the yellow has faded completely, not that it matters—the makeshift refresher tent doesn’t have mirrors.

In this manner, Anakin Skywalker makes it a full 52 hours without even suspecting he’s a Sith.

“Hey, General,” one of the guys tosses out the next planetary evening, when Anakin actually gets a free moment to join a group of ten or eleven troopers around the campfire for end-of-day rations.  (Usually he just sprays his flimsiwork with crumbs for a few hours before rolling onto his bedroll when his brain shuts down.)  The sky is purple in the east but still tinged orange in the north, across the wide, shadowy flood plain.  Their group is sheltered against a convenient little eruption of boulders that glitters where the firelight catches it, with a nice view of forty or fifty other campfires ringed with silhouetted clones, dotting the barren landscape.  “What’s with the eyes thing?”

“Eyesh fhing?”  Anakin swallows his dry, gritty mouthful and gives the guy half his attention.  “What do you mean?”

“You know, the—“ The trooper puts his wrists against his eyes and wiggles his fingers in a way that’s probably meant to illustrate something.  Anakin, who’s been searching his memory for this guy’s name, has a flash of inspiration—Comms, known for his communication skills.

“No one knows what you mean, Comms,” Redeye sighs.

“No, I saw it too,” one of the no-longer-rookies-but-not-quite-vets pipes up from the next campfire over, tuning out of his own conversation.  “Begging your pardon, General, but your eyes went, um.  All weird.  Like, pale.  Is that a Jedi thing?”

Anakin goes still.  His heartbeat wavers in a way he has come to associate with the aftermath of electrocution.

“Um.  Haha.  Did they look like they were an, uh.  A certain color?”

“What…color, sir?”

“Oh, just any color.”

The trooper thinks for a minute, tapping the helmet on his lap.  “Maybe yellow?  Yes, yellowish, sir.”

Jesse, sitting on Anakin’s left, looks closely at his rapidly paling face.  “Is that like, an important Jetiise thing, General?”

Anakin laughs; it’s extremely stilted.  “Uh, no.  I don’t think so.  Maybe it was a trick of the light?”  Doubtful expressions resolve into blandness around him, and Anakin realizes this is not going to fly.  “Or maybe it’s something I don’t know about.  I’ll check with someone at the Temple on leave.  I’m sure it’s not a big deal.”

Silence.

“So, heading back to Coruscant in three weeks standard.  Anyone got any plans?”

They humor him by changing the subject, which is why his legion is the best legion.  He waits just long enough to not seem incredibly suspicious and then fast-walks back to his personal tent.

He misses the comfort of a ship.  Nice, thick walls between him and everyone who depends on him.  Anakin retires to his tent that night and has a very, very quiet breakdown.

/B/

Morning breaks in spectacular fashion on this planet: the sky goes from pinkish to pure, glowing white over the course of an hour before resolving to a cloudless light yellow, owing to the unusual way the atmosphere scatters radiation from two suns.  The white glow reflects off of the rocks that stick up in small, low patches across the plain, creating a glittering mirage at the horizon where the distances between patches seem negligible.

By the time the sky is showing a yellowish tint, Anakin has had time to get past the panic stage and think about some things.  One of these thoughts, above all, has been extremely helpful in his efforts to regain his equanimity: Namely, that there’s simply no way this is what it looks like.  Sure, he was able to fish a shaving mirror out of the bottom of his pack and confirm that his eyes were, in fact, looking pretty…well, Sithly.  Sure, it was extremely disturbing.  However, after thoroughly and objectively examining his emotions (yeah, Obi-Wan, laugh it up), he has come to the unquestionable conclusion that he doesn’t feel any different than he did the day before yesterday.

He’s never been an ideal Jedi on the internal side of things, of course.  He tends to manifest success more in terms of external results, and he’s come to terms with that.  (Really, he has.)  He’s always been prone to blundering anger, childish jealousy, and irrational anxieties.  He’s done terrible things.  When his mother—well.  He showed restraint then, though, he only killed the adults by the tent and those who tried to prevent him from carrying—well.  Anyways.  He wanted to do much more, but he didn’t, and that was the closest he ever came to Fa—to truly Sithlike behavior.

No, he’s searched his heart thoroughly, and can say with absolute certainty that he feels no desire to maim, murder, or monologue more than usual this morning.  He would rather not assemble children’s lost sabers into a ghoulish display.  He hasn’t been filled with contempt for the huddling masses (please, his mother would never have allowed it), and the prospect of manipulating any of his important people to their doom remains repulsive to him.  Surely, if he had gone bad, he would have recklessly murdered at least one subordinate between his tent and the refresher this morning.  He hasn’t even felt the urge to kick a grok-puppy.

So Anakin can’t be a Sith.  There’s just no possibility.  Zilch.  Nada.

But will anyone else see it that way?

That’s the thing.  Anakin has always been the fuck-up Jedi, ever since he joined at the ripe old age of nine.  They know he’s too emotional.  They know he’s far too comfortable with killing.  They know violence is the only thing he’s really good at, and they wield him accordingly.  In some ways he’s even grateful for it, the way the Council stands in for his self-control, throwing him onto battlegrounds where he can vent his negative emotions (into the Force) on the right people rather than bring them home to Ahsoka, Obi-Wan, and Padme.  In other ways, it makes him uncomfortable that they’re treating him like a child.  Like a tool.

Anyways.

If Obi-Wan showed up at the Temple with glowing yellow eyes and a red lightsaber, they would certainly give him the benefit of the doubt.  They would assume it was a trick, accuse him of being a changeling in disguise.  If it proved true, they would bemoan this most unexpected and devastating of tragedies.  But if Anakin gets caught looking a little yellowy around the iris?  Acting a little moodier than usual?  Why, that’s practically a self-fulfilling prophecy right there.

So his first priority, really, should be concealment.

Or rather, his first priority should be the eighteen more grueling days of fighting they face before they can even think about leave.  Thank the Force for the war, he supposes.  Ha.

He leans further into the Force to wake himself up (and is a bit surprised by the jolt of energy he feels), eyes himself distrustfully in his shaving mirror once more, and shoulders past his tent flap into the crisp yellow morning.  Somehow, life goes on.

/B/

The next eighteen days are comparatively uninteresting.  Mostly transport around the planet, plus two skirmishes and one three-day battle during which only a risky-but-successful night attack yields significant casualties.  The troublemakers in the infantry get rowdier as leave approaches, leading to an escalating prank war that almost gives their position away during an air raid risk window in a fabulous burst of glitter; this ultimately forces Rex to deliver a series of fierce public reprimands.  (Public as in the 501st, anyway; they of course won’t make it into Rex’s or Anakin’s reports.)

Anakin checks his eyes in puddles, metal instruments, and his shaving mirror whenever he gets a chance, enough that the men start joking that he’s gone vain.  If Ahsoka were here, she’d be loudly amazed that they think this is a new development.

Anakin’s reputation notwithstanding, he does manage to learn some things.  The yellow doesn’t necessarily happen when he uses the Force, which makes sense because he’s drawing on the Force to some degree pretty much all the time.  Instead, his eyes seem to light up whenever he’s experiencing strong emotion, and particularly desire of any kind.  The desire to protect his men, the desire to go to sleep, the desire to crush his datapad into tiny splinters and scatter them on the wind—it doesn’t matter how fleeting, it’ll set them off about half the time, as far as he can tell.  He can’t control them, either to prevent them from lighting up or force them to shut down.

By now, many of his men have seen it, and Rex has warily checked in to make sure there’s no way it’s what he thinks it could be, leaving reassured by Anakin’s word that he’ll get it checked out.  (Utapau hasn’t happened yet.  Actually, it never will).  So from a certain perspective, Anakin’s secret is common knowledge at this point.  However, no clone of the 501st is ever going to spread private information on his general’s health to a different Jedi, and he has Kix’s confirmation that he won’t include this Jetiise stuff in his medical reports.  Most of the clones just don’t know enough about the Force to deal with esoteric medical problems or connect the dots between “yellow eyes” and “very, very bad.”  So from that angle, at least, he’s covered.

However, a few days from now, he won’t just be surrounded by clones anymore. He’ll need to either sink very deep into the calmness of the Force and not feel a single desire for the entire duration of his Temple-bound leave—yeah, not likely—or find some way to keep everyone from seeing his eyes at all during that time.

On the last day before they decamp back to Coruscant, Anakin finds his salvation at a flea market in the planetary capital.  It’s a pair of dark-tinted glasses, really closer to goggles, the kind rich people on Tatooine wore over a thin veil to protect against the suns.  Only these ones have broad lenses that continue past the eyes, wrapping outward around the head almost to where they would hook over a humanoid’s ears.  They’re not particularly comfortable, and they’re horrifically ugly, but it’s not like he has a lot of options.

Twenty-eight hours of interstellar travel later, his landing transport, the first of many, thumps onto its platform and sends up a puff of dust.  The hatch that opens before its occupants sets them squinting in the bright Coruscant sunlight.  Anakin grimly slides on his unfashionable eyewear and prepares to face his fate.

/B/

The first few hours at the Temple go surprisingly well.  He surprises himself with the wave of homesickness that hits him at the sight of its soaring architecture, blocking the sun with a serene majesty that stands out starkly from the bustling streets around it.  He’s never really felt like he belonged here, but he’s come close, many times.  When he was fifteen and the normally forbidding Jocasta Nu stayed up five hours past the library’s closing time to help him with the research paper he was frantically trying to finish by morning.  When he was thirteen and Aayla Secura stayed with him in the Halls of Healing because Obi-Wan couldn’t, cracking deceptively straight-faced jokes to distract from the pain and stealing a mouse droid so he could show her some mods.  When he was ten or eleven and things with Obi-Wan were the best they would ever get, because he’d figured out moving meditation and they had dinner at Dex’s once a month, and he had finally started to feel like all of this could last.

Of course, his view of the Temple is somewhat spoiled by the greenish-brown tint it acquires through his cheap glasses, and by the dread that accompanies the reason he’s wearing them.

He gets a few odd looks as he trudges up the Temple steps.  They multiply in the halls, where one Padawan even points subtly and giggles something to their friend.  Anakin’s face heats.  He sets his jaw more firmly and increases the pace of his strides toward his quarters, looking straight ahead.

His quarters are a blessing, mostly because the glasses have started to hurt his ears.  Plus, these rooms are kept warmer than the rest of the Temple, the curtains are open to let in a cheerful glow, and Ahsoka has taken the liberty of strewing her stuff everywhere in his absence.  He makes a fragrant cup of tea and distracts himself by folding some of the spare clothes she’s strewn across the couch arms and building a passive-aggressive pile in the corner.  He only gets a few minutes’ respite here, though, because he has to go report to the Council for debrief and logistics.  Mercifully, Obi-Wan won’t be there; he gets in early tomorrow morning for a week’s short leave after the grueling defensive campaign near Hoth.  (Anakin has avoided thinking thus far about what Obi-Wan might think of his ocular predicament, thanks to a process he calls “preemptively releasing worries to the Force” and another Jedi might call “denial.”)  He makes it several steps back into the tiled hall outside his quarters before his heart jumps to his throat and he remembers to put the sunglasses back on.

His heart is still thumping when he makes it to the Council’s meeting room.  However, the two-hour debrief actually goes fairly well.  They have their criticisms, as always, but he met all objectives with a relative dearth of casualties on this last campaign, and they only ran out of rations for one four-day stretch, so the supply chain issues are clearly beginning to resolve themselves.  It creates a marginally festive air in the Force, belying the gravity on the faces of the participants.

The Council members also seem rather confused by his new eyewear, but they’re used to considering him an eccentric.  Mace Windu makes a dry comment about “bold choices” as Anakin leaves that brings back his blush but doesn’t necessarily require a response.  If anyone does ask, he’ll just say it’s a Tatooine thing, like the black robes, and they’ll make some gleeful comment about attachment and let it slide.  He knows how these things go.  He practically runs back to his quarters through the winding halls of the Temple, and then he is finally, finally at liberty to collapse on the newly clothing-less couch for a well-deserved nap.

/B/

Three hours later Ahsoka blows in, datapad under her arm and clearly still caught up in all the make-up classes she’s enrolled in based on the absentminded greeting she tosses at him where he stands in the kitchen, contemplating dinner.  Then she freezes, clearly registering that she hasn’t seen him in person in a month, and tosses her datapad on her bed so she can sprint over and give him a hug.  “Skyguy!”

“Heya, Snips!  How are your classes?”

“You know, same old.  How’s Rex, how are the men?!”

“Rex is fine.  Fives picked up this wind instrument thing in the planetary capital and has been loudly teaching himself to play it, so that’s pretty much the biggest problem in Rex’s life right now.  The men are good.”  He’ll give her the casualty report tonight, when she doesn’t have any more work to do; he knows that’s not what she’s asking for right now.  They have a system, nowadays.

“Am I shipping out with you when you leave, do you know?  Please say yes, I’ve been dying of boredom here.”

He’d rather she be dying of boredom than blaster fire, he doesn’t say.  It wouldn’t matter, because he knows the answer to her question.  “Yep!  Two and a half weeks, we’re headed to the Mid Rim.  Not sure which front yet, if any.”

“Wizard!”

He has no idea where she picked up that expression.  He suspects Obi-Wan.

Concluding that he lacks the energy to cook a real meal tonight, Anakin grabs the dehydrated moskrat rolls from the top shelf where he pseudo-hides them from Ahsoka and tips nine of them into a pan.  Ahsoka chatters happily at him about her classes, her holodramas, Barriss, and Master Piell’s latest effort to bring his mischievous padawan in line; apparently even Windu got involved this time.  Anakin finds it oddly soothing to hear about people getting in trouble who aren’t him.  The rolls sizzle and sputter in the pan, filling the small set of rooms with a delicious meaty smell as the last rays of sunlight, refracted back over the planet’s edge, follow their origin point beneath the horizon.  It’s as dark as Coruscant gets outside the window now, but inside is warmth and light.  And Ahsoka’s pile of clothes in the corner, which she is studiously ignoring in an act of passive-aggression just as practiced as his own.

He seasons the rolls heavily as they finish swelling up to their intended volume, expertly drains the excess water using the pan lid, and tips the golden-brown cylinders onto a plate, presenting them to Ahsoka at the table with a flourish.  She rolls her eyes at him and finishes texting someone on her datapad.  “So, did you get any videos of Fives’ efforts with the oboe?”

“Better: someone got a video of Rex’s reaction and uploaded it anonymously to the servers.  I think he’s going to pop a blood vessel one of these days.”

She winces, rather hypocritically; they both know they collectively cause half of Rex's headaches.  The conversation continues in this vein as they slowly crunch their way to the bottom of the pile.

Ahsoka dips over to refill her glass at the sink.

There’s one last moskrat roll on the plate, and Anakin’s going to let Ahsoka have it, like a good master.  Really, he is.  That doesn’t stop him from staring hungrily at it from his seat at the table, mournfully contemplating the sacrifices we make for our ungrateful younglings.

He senses it when Ahsoka goes completely still.

“…Master?”  She sounds…afraid.  He’s on his feet immediately, searching for the threat, whirling when she jolts back against the counter at his movement.  How would someone get in—on the ground, or—?  She’s—she’s looking at him.

“Ahsoka?  Ahsoka, what’s wrong?”

“Umm….”  She points a shaking hand at his face.  Slowly, it dawns on him that he took off his glasses earlier in the comfort and safety of his quarters.

Oh, kriff.

“It’s not what it looks like.  I mean.  Kind of.”  He starts to step forward, then flinches when her fear spikes and backs away with slow, measured steps instead.  He puts his hands out at waist level and shows his empty palms, trying to keep his movements as non-threatening as possible.  “I’m still me, I’m still loyal to the Republic and the Order and the ideal of not being all—all murdery, and everything—”  He can feel her fear over their training bond, fear of him, and it makes him sick to his stomach.  She should never be afraid of him.  There’s not much room in their quarters, so he ends up awkwardly standing in the curtained doorway of his own bedroom.

“It just kind of happened,” he finishes, keeping his voice quiet and soothing, willing her to feel his earnestness and not his panic through the bond.  “A couple weeks ago.  I don’t know why it did, but—I would never deliberately hurt you, Ahsoka.  Ever.  I would rather die.”

The last bit, the dead seriousness of his tone—and perhaps the way he has to push a loose fold of the curtain off of his head right after; it’s hard to picture Dooku looking so ungraceful—breaks her out of panic mode, and she narrows her eyes, hand still on her right lightsaber but relaxing away from the wall a bit.  “Just me?  What about other Jedi?”

“No, not them either!  I don’t want to hurt anybody!”  Besides the obvious people, anyway.

She seems reassured.  “Are you—I mean.  And you have no idea what caused this?”

“No?  Uh, from what I can tell from the guys it happened in the middle of a fight, but like, a fairly normal fight?  I didn’t do anything particularly, uh….  So like, maybe it’s not even a Si—a you-know-what thing!  Maybe it’s just a weird genetics thing!  I mean, my genetic makeup is really weird, anything’s possible, right?”

“So your eyes just started like…doing that?  And nothing else, it’s just random color change?”

“Yeah, it’s freaky.”  He’ll mention the part where he’s maybe a little stronger in the Force later, when she’s not so alarmed; that part’s still fairly ambiguous anyways.

She’s still very still, but some of the tension is starting to go out of her shoulders.  He can feel her uncertainty, her reaction teetering weightlessly in midair like a perfectly balanced scale.  “Well, I guess if you haven’t…done anything…that’s just….”  She trails off, takes a deep breath.  “Kark.  What do we even do about this?”

The question of the month.  “I wish I knew.  Besides, uh, these.”  He unhooks the glasses from a fold in his robe and waves them halfheartedly.

Here’s the hard part, though.  He musters his best pleading face.  “Please don’t tell anyone, Ahsoka.  I don’t know what they’ll—”  Pause, rephrase.  “I just don’t want the Council to…overreact.”

He sees her mouth twist as she struggles not to acknowledge the validity of that concern.  She’s not as cynical as he is about the Order, not yet.  He’s done his best not to burden her with his attitude all that much in that area.  It’s the only home she’s ever known.  But she’s also been to the wars now, literally.

The scale tips.  “Okay, Master, I can hold off on telling anyone.  For now, until we know more.”  She takes a steadying breath.

“But we need to tell Obi-Wan.”

“No!”  The scale tips rapidly back the other way and then falls off the metaphorical table.  Anakin’s heart stutters; his stomach goes the way of the scale.  Obi-Wan is the last person who needs to know, Obi-Wan will—well, honestly, Anakin has no idea what he’ll do in this situation, but he’ll be horrified, there’s no question of that.  Obi-Wan will look at him, look right through him, look down on him and sure, Obi-Wan already knows his former padawan isn’t exactly a Jedi success story, but there’s a big difference between knowing that and knowing that your padawan has Fall—

Nope.  Not that, because that’s not what happened, but it’s what Obi-Wan will think happened, and he’ll be looking down on Anakin in shock and disappointment and Anakin won’t have any clue how to fix it, doesn’t even really know what he did wrong, and the thought makes him want to curl up and die a little, gently, somewhere deep inside his chest—

“Master?”

Calm down, Ahsoka’s here.  Ahsoka’s watching, and her alarm is starting to mount again and feed into his own, so he needs to be a capable gods-damned Jedi for once in his life and calm down.  He breathes out slowly.  “Sorry, Snips, I just.  I sort of don’t want to go to him until I know for sure what’s going on.”

Ahsoka bites her lip nervously, flashing a sharp canine.  “I get that, I do, but…I’d really rather not be the only Jedi who knows about this.”

It takes him a moment to understand her meaning, and then a fresh wave of guilt and shame practically takes him out at the knees where he’s still standing under the stupid curtain.  Ahsoka must register it, he must not be shielding enough, because she actually steps forward and hurries to reassure him: “Not that I don’t trust you, Master, I do!  I just—I mean, crazy stuff happens out there, at war and all, and this is pretty crazy, and I just don’t really feel qualified to help you deal with this if it’s just me—“

The overhead lights flicker.  He holds up a tired hand and she subsides, pulling at her fingertips and eyeing him anxiously.  She looks so young—like she always does, really—and Anakin knows he can’t be selfish here.  This is Ahsoka; he’d throw himself into a thousand sarlacc pits to make her feel safe.  As safe as he can; as safe as he’s in a position to make her feel on the frontlines of a war that never seems to end.

“Okay,” he says, and in spite of all his noble intentions he’s still trying to convince himself as he says it.  It’s like someone tied a knot in his intestines.  But he knows his duty.

“You’re right.  We’ll talk to Obi-Wan about it.”

/B/

Ahsoka agrees that it can wait until morning.  She opts to stay the intervening night in Barriss’ and Luminara’s quarters, which Anakin understands and even applauds as the kind of wise, cautious decision he wants her to make, even if it makes him want to gouge his eyes out a little bit.

He knows himself well enough to gather that he won’t be getting any sleep tonight, much less the luxurious five or six hours he strives for whenever he’s on leave in the Temple.  After about three hours of staring dully at the floor, he decides that if he’ll be awake anyways, he might as well do it somewhere nicer smelling, with more expensive sheets.  Plus, if he really is informing all his important people about his newest medical…?  Development?  Then he should probably give his beloved wife a heads-up too.

After comm-ing to make sure she’s free and he won’t wake her (senators keep odd hours), he "requisitions" a speeder from the Temple garage and heads out through the Coruscant night.  Neon flashes past on both sides, too quickly even to identify the many languages represented on the sides of Coruscant’s skyscrapers and mobile signboards.  It gets darker as he enters the senate district, if only because night disguises the kind of opulence that doesn’t announce itself with glowing letters.  He flashes his false credentials and dips down a discreet tunnel entrance, emerging into a dimly lit basement garage packed with flashy speeders, silent and empty.  No one is there to give him a second glance as he locks his borrowed speeder and dips into the servants’ entrance half-hidden behind a pillar.

He wonders as the elevator rumbles up to her floor whether he’ll be able to muster up yellow eyes to demonstrate, because otherwise this will be a much more confusing conversation, but he needn’t have worried—when he ducks into Padme’s refresher after letting himself into her rooms, they’re going strong.  He supposes he shouldn’t be surprised; maybe it’s residue from the conversation with Ahsoka, or dread at the prospect of telling Obi-Wan.  Or maybe it’s just that seeing Padme always makes him feel things.  If it’s the latter, that’s actually more evidence that the eyes can’t be a Sith thing, really—Jedi Code be damned, he just can’t imagine how what he feels for Padme could be a bad thing.

“Ani?” she calls, probably just now hearing him from the main recreation room.  Padme’s apartment is huge.

“Here, Angel,” he calls, trying to inject some cheer into his voice and missing the vein entirely.

“Good, I’ve been worried.  What’s this medical thing you wanted to talk about, is it serious?  You said the day before yesterday that you hadn’t been wounded….”

“It’s, um—”  It’s easier to show than tell.  Anakin indicates his eyes with one hesitant hand, feeling his shoulders hunch as he prepares for her disgust.

“Oh, your—?  Oh, kriff.  I…yes, I see why you’re concerned.”  Padme is surprised, cautious perhaps, but not horrified and certainly not judgmental.  She comes right up to him, puts a hand on his shoulder and stretches onto tiptoes to examine him more closely.  He looks back into her wide eyes and feels some of his shame ebb away, finds himself staring at the tiny wrinkle that forms between her brows when she concentrates.  “You’re right, it’s definitely odd.  Hmm, the color is rather pretty.”

That causes him to blink against his wishes, drawing back a bit.  “Pretty?  No, it’s an awful color.  It’s all wrong and like.  Sickly.”

She leans in a little closer, tilts his chin down slightly with one hand for a better angle; he holds himself very still and marvels at this amazing person who wants to spend her life with him.  Her breath puffs lightly on his neck.  “You’re just saying that because you’re biased, dear one.  I’ve never seen Dooku or anyone like that go all glow-y on me, and I think it’s pretty.”  She hesitates.  “It suits you.”

Anakin’s not sure how he should feel about that, honestly, but he loves his wife rather a lot, so he decides that just going with it should be okay.

So Anakin catches up on logistics forms while Padme leans up against him on the couch and drafts a proposal for one of her many Senate subcommittees, and it’s warm and quiet, and when he asks if she wants tea she doesn’t hesitate to look him in the eye and smile in thanks.  A few hours before dawn she goes to sleep, and he lays on his side of her bed and alternates between quietly drafting a strategy review and watching her breathe.  It’s a good night, all things considered.  Being with her makes it easier not to think.

But he still has to tell Obi-Wan the next day.

/B/

Anakin meets Ahsoka just outside the Temple dining hall in the morning.  He knows he won’t be able to keep anything down, but a growing Togruta can’t afford to skip meals when she doesn’t have to.  She looks haggard, but she quickly hides the lost look in her eyes behind bravado when she first catches sight of him.  “You look like hell, Skyguy!”

They walk in together, heading for the line at the order kiosk.  “Yeah, yeah, laugh at your master.  Maybe I should trade you out for Rex, just to get some respect around here.”

“What, tape a rolled-up towel on his head and hope nobody notices the difference?”

“You leave enough of your spare clothes lying around if we really want to complete the illusion.”

She snorts, tapping at the touch screen.  “I’d pay good credits to see that.”  She gets the recommended carnivore breakfast this morning, essentially just a pile of meat on a bed of egg whites; he orders a muffin.

The dining hall is abuzz with quiet conversations and the swishing of robes, as about half of the tables in the huge room are occupied by master-padawan duos and small groups of friends at this hour.  No space in the Temple can really be called loud, but the vaulted stone ceiling does multiply their voices to a cheerful hum.  He sees some bandages, some splinted limbs.  When their meals are ready, Anakin and Ahsoka carry their trays to a table and chat through breakfast as if nothing is wrong.  It’s an effort, on his part as well as hers, but it gets easier as her pile of steaks slowly diminishes over the course of an hour and his muffin wanes to gibbous.

She scrapes her plate for the last of the juices.  He stands when she stands, feeling a bit like a man on the way to his execution, and tosses his ultimately half-eaten muffin in the waste disposal chute.  Together, they amble through the dining hall’s high back archway into the wide, dimly lit hall outside, its hanging lanterns turned off for the day.

“Okay, now let’s go find Obi-Wan?”  Ahsoka looks up at him with big eyes.  He feels the weight of her gaze, of the moment.

He takes a deep breath, lets it out.  “Yeah, let’s.”

She checks around to make sure the hall is empty before surprising him with a hug from the side that drives the breath out of him in a startled “Whoomf!”  Then she’s striding off down the hallway ahead of him with her hands behind her back, the picture of nonchalance.

He stares after her for a moment in wonder.  What did he do to deserve such faith?

Then, of course, he has to jog to keep up, because even in her finest moments she’s a terror.  He wouldn’t have it any other way.

/B/

They find Obi-Wan in one of the Temple’s empty study rooms, reclining in a legless chair in a way that probably looks gracefully insouciant to anyone who hasn’t learned to recognize his exhaustion.  He has a datapad on his lap, but it doesn’t look like much flimsiwork is getting done; he might actually be taking a nap in the sunlight, if Anakin is any judge.  Still, he opens his eyes and turns expectantly when they enter.

“Ah, my grand-padawan and my less grand padawan.  To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Ahsoka laughs, because she’s a suck-up when it comes to Obi-Wan.  “How goes the war, old man?” Anakin responds, because he’s genuinely happy to see Obi-Wan, not because he’s stalling.

They manage a few minutes of catching up before Ahsoka elbows Anakin in the side, a clear signal that she sees right through him.  He winces.  “Actually, Obi-Wan, there’s something important I…could use your opinion on.”

Obi-Wan raises an eyebrow and gestures as if to say the floor is yours.

“No, Obi-Wan, it’s—”  He catches himself fiddling with the arm of his glasses and hurriedly lowers his hand.  “Not here.”

Obi-Wan looks at him, really looks, for the first time.  He looks terrible, he knows, and not just because the glasses do not flatter his bone structure.  He’s sweaty and his heartbeat still feels odd, and he didn’t sleep at all the night before and very little before that.  Beside him, Ahsoka is giving Obi-Wan distressed grok-puppy eyes.

“I have a minute, I suppose,” Obi-Wan says mildly, setting down the tablet.

The long corridor they walk through on the way to the Room of a Thousand Fountains is beautiful, which almost makes it worse somehow.  The windows lining the beige stone corridor are wide and numerous, cheerfully splashing bright afternoon sunlight across the opposite wall and throwing everything into such sharp relief that he can see the porous texture of the walls and hairline cracks in the tile floor.  Their footsteps echo loudly in the silence, Anakin’s clacking clear and distinct while Obi-Wan and Ahsoka tap-shuffle along more softly in the background; due to their different stride lengths, the sounds continually merge and disentangle.

At length, they come into view of the first grand fountain on this level and beeline for a reasonably close but also exceedingly private section: there’s a secluded grotto accessed by ducking behind a seemingly solid rock wall, containing about eight yards square of soft white sand (ugh) with a small pond fed by a trickling waterfall on one edge.  The dark rocky walls are smooth inside and tilt outward, ending about fifteen yards up but below the ceiling, so the grotto is actually open at the top.  Because of this, you can hear the great rushing noise generated by a thousand fountains, some splashing, some trickling, all inhabiting one winding, seemingly segmented but actually continuous space.  However, something about the structure of this grotto and the porous stone prevents sound from escaping.  Anakin should know—he’s comm-ed his wife from here enough times, and swept for bugs every time he did it.

“So Anakin has a problem,” Ahsoka kicks things off mercilessly, clearly seeing on his face that he would procrastinate forever if he could.

This is for her, he reminds himself in his mind.  It turns into a mantra: Thisisforher, thisisforher, thisisforher.

“Yeah, so.”  He swallows, clears his throat.  “Toward the end of my last campaign, this weird thing started happening.  With, uh.  My eyes.  It’s, um.”

“Your eyes?” Obi-Wan says slowly, dawning suspicion and something like fear on his face.  “Anakin—”

“I don’t feel any different!” Anakin rushes to get out before Obi-Wan can put his suspicions together.  E chu ta, he’s gonna hurl right here, that half of a muffin is going to end up in the fountain.  “It’s, literally, it’s a cosmetic problem, it’s just—”  Rip off the bandage, his mother’s voice advises in the back of his mind.  Before he can wimp out, Anakin tears off the glasses.

Obi-Wan is, for once, speechless.  He just freezes in place.

“I don’t even feel any different than usual,” Anakin repeats like a malfunctioning droid.

“I…Anakin, you….”  The thing Obi-Wan’s face is doing under the beard looks somewhere between heartbroken, terrified, and deeply confused.  He stumbles back a step.

“It really can't be what it looks like!” Anakin gets out in a cracked voice.  This doesn’t feel real.  He feels like he’s choking.

Ahsoka has latched onto his elbow.  He can feel her leaning into his right side, fingers digging a little too deep into his arm.  It grounds him.  “It could just be a species thing!” she jumps in to defend him.  “Plenty of species naturally have yellow eyes, right?  And Skyguy’s dad’s not really, like, a thing”—interesting way to phrase that—“and hybrids do happen, sometimes, and maybe this is just, like, a natural biological age thing, you know?”

“I don’t really know my ancestry on either side,” Anakin adds with only a slight pang of discomfort, warming to her theme and trying to get his thoughts in order.  Obi-Wan’s not—he’s not doing anything.  Just frozen in place, looking at Anakin with wide, searching eyes.  “Could be some changeling in there, maybe?”

“Some—what?”

“We said it might be because he has some non-human ancestry.”  Ahsoka is the first to catch on to the fact that Obi-Wan has not processed anything they’ve said for the past few seconds.

Obi-Wan blinks, shakes his head a little bit.  Stops looking quite so much like a man experiencing his worst nightmare, and more like a man who’s just not sure if he’s having a really weird dream.  “You’re…so you think it might not be….”

“No, Master, I mean, if it was…I mean, I would know, right?  If it got that far?”

“He hasn’t done anything evil, I confirmed with Rex.  He’s still Anakin,” Ahsoka chimes in, leaning more of her weight onto him so that he has to reposition his feet to support her.  “He’s still our Skyguy, Master.”

A long, tense moment passes in silence.

Abruptly, something flickers back to life in Obi-Wan’s vacant eyes, and he frowns more deliberately, the hand that had been resting on his lightsaber drifting up to stroke his beard.  His body language is still defensive in a way that sets Anakin’s teeth on edge and he’s not meeting his eyes, but that last part’s probably not a bad thing right now anyway.  “That’s…I’d have to do some research,” he muses.  “Not in the Temple archives, that’s out of the question”—Anakin feels a pulse of shock that nearly takes him out at the knees—“so we’ll have to go to the Grand Library of Coruscant Metro 1, maybe through a contact.  Maybe—“

“Master,” Anakin interrupts.  He licks cracked lips.  “You mean you’re…not going to tell the Council?”

At this, Obi-Wan finally meets his eyes.  The expression in them is wary, searching; Obi-Wan scrutinizes him for a full four uncomfortable seconds before slowly shaking his head.

“No,” he says lightly.  “No, I don’t think that would be wise.”

All the energy drains out of Anakin’s body like water through a sieve.  But in a good way.

“I’m going to go, ah.  Think about this.  We’ll come up with a plan,” Obi-Wan corrects himself, almost recovering his usual confident tone but not quite getting there.  “I assume you have, well, yes, you’ve got concealment covered.  I was wondering about…those.”  Obi-Wan indicates the glasses in Anakin’s hand with distaste in the curl of his lip.  “Was there truly nothing better?”

“Kriff’s sake, Master, I didn’t have a lot of options!”

“Hmm.  Well, we’ll figure it out.  Please don’t forget to put those back on.”

Anakin probably doesn’t have a right to feel offended, since that’s how he ended up revealing himself to Ahsoka on literally the first day.  He feels offended regardless.

“I’ll leave first, in case someone is watching,” Obi-Wan adds, still somewhat absently.

“Force be with you, Master!” Ahsoka calls after him as he heads out.  Obi-Wan, surprised, turns back to look at them with something like a very disturbed wry smile.

“Ha.  Indeed.”

He disappears around the corner.

They stand there in silence for a few more moments as it really sinks in how well that went.  That actually—that was probably the best possible outcome.  (He didn’t look disgusted.)  “If that’s settled, I’m going to go sleep for a week,” Anakin laughs weakly, leaning his pounding head back against the cold stone wall.  He feels dizzy from relief.

Eyes closed, he hears but doesn’t see Ahsoka gasp dramatically.  “Succumbing to the darkness already?!”

Anakin winces.  “Too soon, Snips.”

She grins, a little shamefacedly.  “Yeah.  Yeah, I know.”

/B/

That night on Coruscant, Sheev twitches and grumbles in his sleep, and wakes up tired and irritated enough to consider a shot of Sith chemicals in his caf as a pick-me-up.  Something has come out of alignment in his web of darkness, but for all his power he can’t tell what.  Something is beginning to shift.

Chapter Text

Anakin spends the whole next day training with Ahsoka and then alone, pushing himself to the point of exhaustion in the simulator salles.  It’s great for not thinking about things.  He taps on Obi-Wan’s door as evening falls, after being literally pushed out of his own quarters by Ahsoka, and finds his old Master cross-legged on the wooden floor, nose buried in a datapad.  He’s pushed his standard-issue couch and side table against the far wall, the only one not blocked by rows of plants in prim little pots, and he’s surrounded in the cleared space by what must be every single datapad, chip, scroll, and book the Coruscant Hub Library has on changeling species life cycles and hybridity.

“What to Expect When You’re Expecting an Invertebrate,” he reads, picking up one of the video cases as he folds into a sitting position in front of Obi-Wan.  The picture on the front is of a bug-eyed Shi’ido mother lovingly cradling some sort of slug thing.  Anakin considers it for a minute, and then— “Eulgh,” he exclaims, dropping it back on the pile to Obi-Wan’s left.  “Never thought about that before.”

“Yes, the diversity of reproductive processes in the universe is a truly wondrous thing,” Obi-Wan recites drily without looking up from his datapad.  “And you of all people don’t get to judge them, dear one, since you have yet to be explained by science.”

“They just haven’t built a DNA sequencer that can hold me,” Anakin says smugly.  Is that something you can be smug about?  He supposes so, although it’s not particularly helpful now that they have an actual pressing reason to inquire into his species-level heritage.  “Anything interesting?”

“Yes, actually, did you know that a Clawdite’s lungs are fully vestigial because regardless of the form they take, they breathe through their skin?”

“Fascinating.”

“Yes, and also Shi’ido hybrids don’t gain the ability to shapeshift.  In any capacity.”  On the last word, Obi-Wan finally looks up.  He says it lightly, but Anakin can hear his master’s heart sinking in time with his own, and his eyes are pained.  “Some Clawdite hybrids do, in the rare event that they live to adulthood, but not human-Clawdite.”

Wait, but Anakin can see a glimmer of hope here.  “But…?” he prompts.

Obi-Wan nods.  “Yes, but you’re already half inhuman, in a sense, so would your midichlorian persuasion be able to somehow reactivate genes that were dormant in your mother?  Perhaps to make up for the lack of DNA from a second parent, prevent recessive genetic diseases?  We just don’t know.  There’s no way to know.”

“So this was a waste of time.”

“Learning something new is never a waste of time,” Obi-Wan says absently, like he’s forgotten that Anakin isn’t nine years old anymore.  Then he catches himself, blushes, and coughs into his hand.  “But yes, essentially.”

Obi-Wan looks terrible, Anakin realizes, looking into bleary blue eyes with the beginnings of dark bags underneath.  He feels a pang of guilt for putting this on Obi-Wan during his short leave.  His old master should be resting and catching his breath, not dealing with Anakin’s messes.

“There is one thing—” Obi-Wan starts, and then cuts himself off.  “No, never mind that.”

“What is it?”

“It’s nothing, an irrelevant thought.”

“Obi-Wan….”

Obi-Wan isn’t meeting his eyes again.  “No, it’s like you said, you would know, if….   Or even if you didn’t, I imagine I certainly would, since we still have a bond.  So it would be truly pointless to try advanced joint meditation at this juncture.  Pointless and dangerous, even; it’s probably unwise for any Jedi to lower their shields that much in the middle of a war.”

“Oh.  Yeah, you’re right, that would be stupid.”  Anakin laughs uneasily.  Dim sunlight filters through the window of Obi-Wan’s empty apartment, which is neat and sparse if you ignore the plant life.  They sit in silence for a moment, avoiding each other’s eyes.

“So, are you going to make it to the seminar tomorrow?” Anakin seizes on the first change of subject that floats to the surface of his mind.  Tomorrow morning at 9, the healers have arranged a seminar on self-healing with the Force in high-stress situations, when you don’t have the option of entering a healing trance.  It’s the first in a series of demonstrations of Force techniques that have been discovered or recovered since the beginning of the war.  This series is the reason a lot of Jedi who are usually on campaign practically nonstop, like Anakin and Obi-Wan, have been temporarily replaced on the frontlines—the Jedi may be generals now, but they’ve found a way to make even that about learning.  Not that there’ve been a lot of conferences and scholarship going on since Geonosis.  But they’re trying, is the point.

“I’ll be there, but I’ll be a bit late.  You and I both will, actually, have you forgotten about the joint strategy meeting in the morning?”

“Ah, sh—definitely not, nope,” Anakin informs him.  “I’m gonna go…not finish up any paperwork.”  He levers himself to his feet as he speaks, feeling rather young.  “And, uh.”  Standing in the doorway, he waves his hand, indicating Obi-Wan and the reading material strewn around him at a sweep.  “Thanks.  Please take a nap, Obi-Wan.”

Obi-Wan’s face acquires that lost look he gets sometimes, where his eyes go soft even as he kind of awkwardly stiffens his body language.  He used to look like that when Anakin hugged him as a child.  “Will do, Padawan.”  He sighs, then brushes a hand through his hair and starts to stand up as well, gathering books and tablets into a stack.  Anakin moves to help him, but he waves him away.  “No, go do your paperwork, you absolute beast.  I swear, it’s like you don’t even read the schedule.”

/B/

“Seminar” may not be quite the right term for this kind of gathering.  If it were a traditional seminar, they could have just holorecorded it and transferred it directly to the generals on their various fronts, and thus avoid all the trouble and risk of recalling some of their most important battalions.  However, these kinds of skills are extremely difficult to learn from description alone; pedagogy is important, but higher-level Force skills are generally passed on at least partially through mid-depth communal meditation.

Anakin shuffles into the room behind Obi-Wan ten minutes after the seminar begins, when most of the attendees are already seated, taking up all of the 250 or so meditation pillows positioned in advance around the enormous hall.  Unfortunately, this means it’s standing room only in the back; Anakin and Obi-Wan end up joining the awkward lines of latecomers, maybe 50 Jedi in total, leaning in staggered clumps against the back wall.  He’s not in a great mood, since the need to be up early and prepared for the four-hour strategy briefing he just got out of prevented him from being able to see his wife last night.  His admittedly poor mental state prevented them from properly enjoying their last rendezvous, and he only has so many nights left to make it up to her.

All this to say, Obi-Wan gave him a quick check on their way here and confirmed that his eyes weren’t actively yellow, but he’ll still be keeping his glasses on tight for the rest of this seminar.

One of the healers at the front, a female Mon Calamari Anakin is vaguely familiar with from physical therapy, waves a hand, and a huge hologram lights up above her, showing a microscope view of cells dividing and growing.  Supplementary holograms also materialize along the walls, in front of or in some cases halfway through the crowd of standing latecomers, causing a few flinches of surprise and some embarrassed shuffling.  A number of Jedi in the back rows of meditation pillows turn to look at these instead, with the result that a hundred or so Jedi are now turned in their seated poses to intensely scrutinize Anakin’s general vicinity.

All those Jedi, all those eyes….Next to him, Obi-Wan gives him a sidelong look, then subtly swats his flesh hand down from where it’s drifted up to fiddle with the arm of his glasses.  Embarrassed, he folds his arms over his chest to preempt any more incriminating wandering and leans back against the wall.

The healer at the front of the hall was nearing the end of the initial verbal explanation when they came in, so they only get to listen for three minutes or so before she invites up her hapless volunteer, a male Twi’lek Jedi with an arm in a sling, and everyone closes their eyes and sinks into meditation.  Anakin regrets it, because this technique seems damn useful, but he doesn’t join them, not wanting to risk that a hall full of literally hundreds of Jedi will sense his…his fear from their communion in the Force.  Feeling a bit like he’s a youngling in a meditation class again, Anakin closes his eyes and lets his mind drift to his plans with Padme this evening.

—And then he opens his eyes again with a jolt, because someone just gave off a pulse of darkness in the Force, and it sure as Sith hells wasn’t him.

The rotten, inky aftertaste was faint to begin with and is fading fast, so there’s little time for stealth; he frantically scans the room while endeavoring to narrow in on the source telepathically.  No one else seems to have noticed—before him in all directions are the backs of peacefully mediating heads—but it was somewhere off to his right— there.  That Besalisk Jedi in the brown robes, standing against the wall fifteen yards to the right.  His signature still feels-smells ever-so-slightly rotten.  Hungry, if Anakin had to put a word to it.  And he’s—Anakin could be mistaken, he was never the best student in Intro to Species Biology and Behaviors, but he thinks the way he’s shifting on his feet means the Besalisk master is bored.  He’s not meditating either; he’s daydreaming.  Apparently about something that’s not quite kosher.

The Force chimes a warning and Anakin manages to face front and close his eyes right before the Besalisk’s head swivels in his direction.

Anakin burns with impatience for the rest of the 30-minute meditation session, barely resisting the urge to try to poke at the other Jedi’s shields again without alerting him.  That wasn’t just a moment of anger or discontent; that kind of Darkness smelled like Dooku or even Maul.  Dangerously dense, even when all he caught was the faintest whiff.

At long last, the session finishes.  The Twi’lek Jedi who’s just healed his arm about a third of the way in a series of two-minute increments, all the while awkwardly jogging in place to simulate a high-stress situation, grins and waves at the crowd, looking slightly embarrassed when his padawan and a group of her friends start cheering and whistling loudly from a cluster in the back.  The two healers leading the demonstration try not to smile but can’t quite manage it, bowing to their volunteer as he fast-walks out of the limelight and the crowd starts to rise to its feet.  “That concludes the presentation,” the human healer, who’s having a harder time concealing his amusement, announces.  “Thank you for coming, and may the Force be with you all.”

The moment the murmur of chatter reaches an acceptable volume to cover it, Anakin leans over to Obi-Wan, who’s done blinking himself into awareness.  “What’s his name again?” he mutters as quietly as he can.

“Who?”

“The Besalisk master, in the brown robes.”

“Oh.  General Pong Krell.”

Anakin frowns.  “There’s something wrong with him.  Can you sense it?”

Obi-Wan stares for a moment, then closes his eyes.  Anakin feels him slipping a few levels deeper into the infinite well of the Force.  About thirty seconds pass, during which Anakin shifts awkwardly from foot to foot and exchanges polite waves with Aayla Secura across the room, and then Obi-Wan’s brow furrows.  He only floats for another few seconds before resurfacing and opening his eyes again, frowning.  “You’re right, there’s something…artificial about his presence.”

Huh.  Anakin didn’t pick up on that, just the convenient burst of darkness from underneath the surface.  By now, Krell’s signature feels completely normal.  Well, Obi-Wan is a Master for a reason.  “He felt Dark for a second,” Anakin passes on as they push off the wall together.  Obi-Wan’s brow acquires another wrinkle.

They join the throng of people beginning to filter out.  Pong Krell, Pong Krell, where has he seen that name written down—“Isn’t he the one with the really high casualty numbers?” Anakin adds in a whisper.  He noted them reading through GAR-wide statistics reports for the meeting this morning.

“The highest, on average.”  Obi-Wan has a grave look on his face now, hand on his beard.  “I should look into him.”

“I’ll ask Rex what his battalion says,” Anakin offers, feeling again the curl of shame at creating more work for Obi-Wan.  He always says he won’t bring Obi-Wan any more messes, and he always ends up crying to him anyway.

“Please do.  And thank you for bringing this to my attention, it’s…certainly concerning.”  He strokes his beard one more time, deep in thought, and then shakes his head slightly, dismissing it for now.  “Although I suppose this means you didn’t catch any of the demonstration, did you.”

Anakin grins.  “I’ll just get Ahsoka to teach me in hyperspace somewhere.”

The crowd in the hallways is starting to thin; the next turn will take Obi-Wan back to his quarters while Anakin heads to the salles to meet Ahsoka, who managed to get a seat at the front for the seminar.  They linger at the turn-off, Obi-Wan raising an eyebrow.  “Your lack of a sense of irony disturbs me, young one.”

“Teaching is an important Jedi skill!  She has to learn somewhere,” he defends himself.

Obi-Wan smirks.  “Hmm, yes, I suppose she does,” he says lightly.

It takes Anakin a second to figure it out.  “Wha— hey!” he sputters, but his last-word-obsessed master is already seeding the Force with smug amusement halfway down the hall.

/B/

Unbeknownst to our heroes, Anakin and Krell were not the only ones pretending to meditate in that hall.  One more being sensed a dark pulse in the Force, one more pair of eyes opened and turned in Anakin’s direction in response.  Only, the owner of these eyes happened to be sitting on the ground, in perfect lotus position—at the perfect angle, coincidentally, to glimpse right up under the arm of General Skywalker’s glasses as he looked to the right at Krell, and see his irises lit up a brilliant amber.

/B/

That evening, Anakin is just turning the corner to the hallway leading to his and Ahsoka’s rooms when he feels the slightest twinge in the Force, a moment before someone grabs his hand.  It’s his right hand, and they immediately let go as a flush of shock and then slight embarrassment blooms in the Force.  People are weird about prosthetics.  She recognized what it was much earlier than most, though, which is his first clue as to her identity.  The height difference is the second.

“Barriss?”

“Master Skywalker.”  Ahsoka’s little Mirialan friend bows gracefully.

He glances between her (or really, the top of her head) and the door of his quarters down the hall.  “Oh, were you looking for Ahsoka?” he ventures uncertainly.

She shakes her head, dark headscarf fluttering with the motion.  “I was actually hoping to talk to you, Master Skywalker.”  At his quizzical look, she hurriedly adds, “It’s about Ahsoka.”  Her heavy Core accent changes the emphasis on his padawan’s name, lengthening and narrowing the “oh.”

Fear instantly floods his nervous system with the power of a learned response.  “Ahsoka?  Is she okay?” he asks, stepping forward and inadvertently causing her to back up a step.

“Oh!  Oh, no, she’s fine, I just had—is there anywhere more private we could talk about this?”

Anakin is now thoroughly confused and still fighting that burst of adrenaline, but he acquiesces easily.  “Uh, sure, maybe…”

“There’s a good place in the library.  If you don’t mind?”

“Oh.  Yeah, sure, that works.”

They start back down the hallway, quickly arriving at the grand staircase down to the library level.  The echoing of their feet on the steps makes the silence more awkward, finally motivating Anakin to cough into his hand.  “So, Padawan Offee, how’ve you been?  How’s Master Luminara?”

“Oh, I’m—fine.  My master is fine.  The same as ever.”  They fall into silence again.

Anakin has spoken with Barriss before, more than once, but always either with Ahsoka in the room or, like, making small talk at the door while Barriss waited for her friend to finish brushing her teeth.  So she’s an acquaintance, but not one with whom he really knows how to hold a conversation.  There’s also a puzzling dynamic in terms of seniority, as she became a padawan only a year after he likely would have become a padawan under normal circumstances, so for years he thought of her as a slightly younger peer, but she remains a padawan due to Miralians’ slower maturity process and is now good friends with Ahsoka, whose age makes her more of a little sister to him.  Well, he shouldn’t think of her in those terms.  His padawan, anyways.  He respects Ahsoka immensely, of course, she is better than he is in so many ways, but he still won’t be thinking of her as a peer for years yet, Force willing.  He doesn’t want to think about her knighthood yet.  He wants her to have a childhood, as much as possible in this meat-grinder of a decade, and even when she is his peer, he’s certain she’ll still always be his kid.

All this is just to say, he looks at Barriss and isn’t sure whether he should talk to her like an adult like himself or a kid like Ahsoka.  It’s a common issue with interspecies interactions, one Anakin dodged dealing with in any meaningful way during his Temple childhood by not having friends.

Leaving the staircase, she leads him into Master Nu’s sprawling subterranean domain through a side entrance.  Only one of its floors is aboveground; he’d estimate they’re about seven floors deep, but he doesn’t really know the library well enough to be sure.  At this time of night, the lights are off except for the small, bright white lights over reading desks spread at wide intervals throughout the space.  It’s completely empty, he can tell at a glance—the stillness, in the room and in the Force, confirms it.  The tall shelves housing flimsi, servers, and scrolls alike loom as great, solid shadows out of the bluish darkness around them, only resolving into diverse arrays of individual shelved objects where one of the reading lights brushes them with the barest suggestion of color.  It isn’t dark enough to make it hard to navigate, but it could get there pretty quick.

Just when he’s starting to worry about being late to see Padme, Barriss points out a shadowed door in the opposite wall that opens at a wave of her hand.  “A few of the other padawans used to hang out here, before the war,” she explains in library-appropriate tones.  The words “hang out” sound kind of awkward when she says them.  “I never joined them, but I know it’s a good place to speak.”

He’s starting to panic again, just a little bit.  Because they haven’t actually gone that far out of their way—only about five or six minutes’ walk, if that—but it feels very remote, and now he’s wondering again what she has to say about Ahsoka that requires this level of secrecy.  Does she have some deep-seated issue that she hasn’t felt comfortable telling him about?  Did she tell Barriss something, the night after she saw his yellow eyes, that she was too afraid to tell him?  Or is she—is she not recovering well from the battlefield, mentally?  Is she socializing healthily?  Is she eating and sleeping, when he’s not there?

It doesn’t help that he senses a strange, intense emotion wafting from Barriss.  It’s…something about it is deeply familiar, and yet at the same time it’s impossible to identify.  Emotions are different, in some ways, sensed from the outside; sometimes it’s hard to match your own feelings to someone else’s even if an objective observer would say they’re identical.

The room appears to be a small, out-of-the-way classroom, disused if the dusty-looking desks pushed against the wall are any indicator.  Then the door closes, leaving the room very dark; he can still see her, but only just.  Barriss stops, turns to him with a quiet swish of layered fabrics.

“I may have misled you.  This isn’t actually about Ahsoka.”

“Oh.”  Part of his anxiety drains out of him in a rush, but alarms are also going off quietly now in the back of Anakin’s mind.  But this is his padawan’s friend.  “Then is there something you need my help with, or…?

In the dark, her eyes flash yellow.

Anakin simultaneously draws and recoils.  They have their lightsabers at each other’s throats in seconds, lighting their faces with eerie strokes of neon blue and green.

“Why the kriff are you a Sith?  How the kriff are you a Sith?!”  He pauses.  “…Also, how did you do that on command?”

“Second eyelid.  You don’t have them.”

Damn.

“And I’m not going to hurt you.  I doubt I could.  I just want to talk.”

“Yeah, you’re gonna be talking a lot, because you’re going to explain—uh, everything.  Now,” he threatens.  Shit, wait, she’s friends with Ahsoka.  She’s best friends with Ahsoka!  Ahsoka sleeps over with her and her master regularly!  He suppresses a retroactive shudder of intense fear that morphs almost instantly into anger.  The servos in his mechanical hand, gripping his lightsaber, start to whirr quietly in protest.

Barriss must sense it, or maybe she can just see it in his eyes, but her dark eyes widen in understanding even as her lightsaber drifts closer to his jugular in warning.  “Master Skywalker.  I would never harm Ahsoka, I promise you.  She’s a dear friend of mine.”

“Sith lie.”

“A bit hypocritical, perhaps?”  She glances down at his saber, then back up.  “Regardless, you clearly haven’t told anyone about it.  You can’t kill me here, because you would be caught and your secret exposed, and you can’t reveal me because I can just as easily reveal you.  I can’t kill you for the same reason.  Mutually assured destruction.”

He frowns at her logic, and then her words catch up to him.  “Wait, what the hell are you talking about, I’m not a Sith!”

She doesn’t even respond to that, just raises an eyebrow until he starts to sweat.  “Really, I don’t know what you mean,” he tries.

She sighs slightly; it’s not audible, but he has to shift his ‘saber slightly so he doesn’t burn her when her shoulders shift down.  “Well, you’ve got the eyes, and that’s enough to get you killed if any Jedi hears about it.  So can we lower our weapons and interact like civilized people?”  Her Core accent makes it sound less ridiculous than it should.

His neck is starting to grow clammy from the heat of the plasma sizzling next to his skin.  There’s a long moment of consideration.  A Sith has been spending time with Ahsoka, months of opportunities to hurt her while he was worlds away, and that still makes his heart pound and his head hazy like nothing else.  However, he doesn’t sense any danger in the Force, and in all that time, she didn’t hurt Ahsoka at all.  She’s a healer, too, that counts for something.  And his padawan is a good judge of character, better than him.

He makes eye contact and nods.  Slowly, moving no faster than she does, he lowers his ‘saber to his side.   With the other hand, he removes his evidently useless sunglasses, which suddenly makes it way easier to see in this very dark room.  Resolutely ignoring that, he gestures that the floor is hers; she takes a deep breath and begins.

“We took the same theology classes.  We both know the Light hasn’t always been all that good, and that there are Force traditions we respect and coexist with that do not acknowledge the Light-Dark binary, but don’t commit any atrocities.  Have you ever heard the tragedy of Darth Plageius the Wise?”

“…No?  Um.  It doesn’t sound familiar.”

“I thought not, I’ve never seen you in the library.”  That part, she mumbles under her breath, but she raises her volume and barrels on before he can take offense.  “He was a Sith lord from, maybe three hundred years ago?  The dating isn’t very exact.  But the legends suggest that he had discovered a way to use midichlorians to create life, through the arcane powers of the Dark Side.  He used it to protect his loved ones, but just think…the Dark Side, having the potential to create life.  Do you know what a healer could do with that? Do you realize how many lives we could save?”  Her voice grows strident, ardent, at the end, and she pauses for a second.  Reins it in.  “If you even barely dip into the scholarship, you’ll see that Jedi attuned to it have long hypothesized that there is something not entirely Light about the Living Force, as a construct, as a concept—but they’ve almost always been dismissed as insane, theologically unsound.  Or they’ve been feared.  And so the orthodox view goes on associating Light with Life and Dark with Death, destruction, self-destruction…even when the evidence is right before our eyes that the Dark Side is creative.  Far more creative than we have been.  

“The boundaries between dichotomies are falling apart, if any dichotomy could ever really meaningfully describe—well, everything.  Good and evil: You can’t deny that the war has blurred that line, if there really is a line, beyond our understanding.  Life and death: The Order does not teach its children to prioritize life over all else.  Much the opposite, we are taught that there are many things worth dying for, and the lives of others are only part of that number.  We are taught to idolize martyrs and, in the ideal case, die in service of something greater.  Anyways, there is no death, there is the Force, so the binary is meaningless regardless,” she finishes in a rush, then levels him with a defiant look as she waits for a response.

He feels like, theologically, her argument is a bit unsound, and definitely the bit at the end there, but he’s never been good at articulating how.  Anyways, he can’t deny that the war has led to a greater emphasis on glorious death in practice.

No, semantics like this aren’t his area.  Better to bring the conversation back to practicalities.  “Sure, okay, that’s all fine, but why are you still at the Temple then?”  His voice hardens.  “Are you planning to betray the Jedi?  Undermine the Order from the inside?”

In the dim blue glow of both of their lightsabers, he sees her eyes go wide.  “No!  No, I’m not.  My interest in the Dark is about helping people, and ending this war.  I’m a healer, I would never perpetrate meaningless violence.”

Her words ring true in the Force, now that he’s listening closely.  Not that he totally trusts that.  “And Ahsoka.  You have no interest in hurting her?  You’re really just friends, unrelated to all…this?”

“Yes, she’s my closest friend.  I would not hurt her.”

Truth, again.  But this situation is still all wrong.  Time for his specialty, stating the obvious: “Okay, so leave the Order,” he says bluntly.

She breaks her intense focus long enough to bring up a hand and grind the heel of it into her forehead.  “I can’t abandon the clones under my command,” she says with gritted teeth, and that distressed feeling in the Force redoubles in intensity.  “And anyway, I could say the same to you.”

She can’t, actually, but that brings up another important point.  “How did you realize I’m…?”  He realizes halfway through the sentence that he has no idea how to finish it, and trails off.

Luckily, she takes his meaning.  “Today at the seminar, I felt a Dark Force user’s signature flare, and when I looked back you were looking to the side.  I could see up under the rim of that…accessory you wear.  You had the eyes.”

“The flare wasn’t me though, that was Pong Krell,” Anakin says defensively, and then could immediately kick himself for his big mouth.  So this is why Rex calls him a walking opsec hazard.

“Pong Krell?  He’s Fallen too?”  Her expression changes very little, but he catches an impression of shock, and worry, and a tinge more of that something else he can’t place.

“Hey, careful with that ‘too,’ kid, the only Sith here is you,” Anakin feels the need to warn, his mechanical hand itching on the hilt of his lightsaber.  She still hasn’t deactivated hers either.

If she were Ahsoka, she would have rolled her eyes.  “Master Skywalker, you realize you reeked of the Dark Side a minute ago.”

“Aftertaste from Krell.  Or the last time Dooku zapped me, or something.”

She inclines her head in a way that reminds him distinctly of Master Luminara, the solemn nod she uses to move along the conversation with people who are being ridiculous and wasting her time.  In Barriss, it comes off as more sarcastic, but somehow no less grave.

“Regardless.  If Pong Krell is a Sith, that could be a serious problem.  I’ve treated clones under his command, and he has a reputation for cruelty.  I certainly wouldn’t approach him as I approached you.”

And look at that, they’ve circled all the way around to his original question.  “So why did you approach me?  What do you think I can do for you?”

The indefinable feeling spikes, peaks in its intensity as she stares at him, seemingly lost for words.  “I thought—” she begins after a long silent moment.  He sees her hand fidget on the hilt of her lightsaber.  “I mean…you’re one too.”

He sighs.  “Sorry, kid, but I’m really not.”

A fun fact about Mirialan physiology: It’s actually very similar to human in terms of facial musculature.  This means he gets the full force of her devastation on her face as well as in the Force, as she positively wilts in response.

She’s trembling, he notices with a start.  The hand that he thought was fidgeting on the lightsaber—she’s actually trying to hide the fact that she’s actually shaking like a leaf.

Sith hells, he realizes, this kid is actually in the middle of some sort of crisis.

It’s this realization that prompts what he says next.

“I—I get your concerns about the Code, though!  I mean, I certainly can’t judge you for having doubts.  I have—a lot.  About the Order, and the war.  Especially about the war.”

She just nods, not meeting his eyes.  Kriff.

“I could talk to you about it more, sometime?  Outside the Temple, where it’s safer?  It’s—it can be valuable, to get a second opinion on things.  Even if the other person doesn’t know exactly what you’re going through.”

Her head snaps up at the offer, suddenly animated again; there’s a manic hope in her eyes.  He has no idea what he’s done to inspire such a strong reaction.  “Yes!  Yes, that would be—you’re right, it’s not safe here.  And I’m taking up too much of your time.”

“No, don’t worry about it.  I can always make time for a friend of Ahsoka’s,” he assures easily, affecting more control of the situation than he really feels.

“I’m busy with Master Luminara tomorrow, but I could—the day after, around noon?  I have a few hours free?”

“Sure, kid, I can do that,” Anakin agrees.  What is he doing.  What is he doing.   He is not qualified to talk a deranged Sith teenager back from the brink!

Who could he pawn this off to?  Obi-Wan?  The thought curdles as soon as he thinks it.  Barriss is an actual, confirmed Fallen Jedi.  Teenager or not— especially because she’s a kid, actually—Obi-Wan would turn her in to the Council ‘for her own good.’  Padme knows people, but she doesn’t know anything about the Force.  There’s nobody else.  There’s really nobody else but him.

Barriss breathes out, slowly, regaining her equilibrium again.  There’s a new resolve on her pale green face when she straightens from bowing deeply to him.  “Thank you, Master Skywalker.  I will see you then.”

He nods back to her, warily, and hits the button to open the door, letting her leave first.  The room fills with dim light, washing their faces in grey as she swishes out into the library proper.  Barriss switches off her lightsaber, and Anakin follows suit a beat later.  They move to part at the top of the staircase.

“Wait!  Please don’t tell Ahsoka.”  When he looks back, Barriss looks truly young for the first time in the conversation.  Closer to his padawan’s age—insecure, uncomfortable.  There’s a pleading look in her eyes.

Of course he caves.

“Fine, I can do that.  But only if you don’t come within five meters of Ahsoka until I’m certain you’re safe.”  Ahsoka comes first.  Always.

She looks unhappy but bobs her head gracefully, the picture of a composed and perfect Jedi.  “Understandable, Master Skywalker.”

He nods, and hopes very ardently that he’s doing the right thing.

/B/

When he finally, finally makes it to his lovely wife’s apartment that evening, after a delicious dinner (takeout, Padme can’t cook to save her life) and then otherwise making up for lost time, he tells her all about his newest problem.  His main remaining question is why Barriss chose to seek him out, and secondary to that, what the hell he’s supposed to say to her the day after tomorrow.  He knows where he’ll take her: Dex’s, the diner where Obi-Wan used to take him as a kid and where he now takes Ahsoka on leave.  Comforting atmosphere, well-protected, and a hub of illicit information exchange, making it excellent for evading prying ears.  But he doesn’t know what he’s going to say.

“Is she looking for a Sith master?” he muses, incredulous.  That would say flattering things about her assessment of his teaching skills, certainly, but it doesn’t seem like a very logical move when you’re a Sith hidden in deep cover in a Jedi temple.  Incredibly risky, even: If he were really a Sith, he probably would have just killed her.

The furrow in Padme’s brow and the way she readjusts herself to lean more upright against his chest tells him she’s giving this her full attention.  “This girl—how old is she?”

“Uh, I think she’s like, 18, 19 standard, but she’s Mirialan, they’re long-lived.  So in baseline human-Twi’lek maturity, that’s like, 15?  16?  Around Ahsoka’s age.”

“And bookish?  Doesn’t have many friends?”

“Ahsoka never said so exactly, but that’s the sense I got.”

Padme nods thoughtfully, inadvertently tickling his neck with her stray hairs.  “And the Order—correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like that provides a very…structured lifestyle, if you’re born into it.  Ideologically, and in general?  And a very tight community as well, wrapped into that.”  Anakin hmms his confirmation, not wanting to interrupt her train of thought.

“So if that was what you were used to your whole life, and all of a sudden you didn’t believe in that anymore, and you were different from everyone else.  I imagine I’d feel very…lost, without a Code to guide me.  And very isolated.”

“You think she’s just desperate to talk to anyone who understands what she’s going through,” Anakin concludes.  And yeah, really, that makes perfect sense.  Her answer to his question, “You’re one too”— he was looking for some kind of hidden meaning behind her words, but that really was it, the whole reason.

“Especially if she views that person as an authority figure,” Padme reiterates seriously, entwining her fingers more firmly with his.  “It sounds like she’s looking to you for guidance, not just a lack of judgment.”

That’s what that undefinable emotion was! It wasn’t just distress, it was that longing.  Thinking back further over the conversation, he realizes: All of that bantha shit about binaries and creativity and idolizing martyrs, there’s no way she really believed that.  That was all abstract theorizing, the sort of thing an edgy padawan might have said to impress their friends back before Maul surfaced and killed Qui-Gon, long before the war, when the Sith were still a bedtime story and not something real and present and threatening.  Theologically sound or not, binaries and abstractions don’t give her anything to hold onto.  They don’t tell her anything about how to move forward, to live as a Fallen Jedi in the day-to-day.

It’s the same problem he’s always had with the Code, the way it feels too restrictive in some areas, too abstract in others, and so arbitrary in where it leaves unanswered questions.  He still doesn’t understand how Obi-Wan and practically all the Temple-raised Jedi he knows can love it so much, can build their lives around that structure, but he can imagine what it might be like to have that for your whole childhood, only to have it ripped away by circumstances beyond your control.

“So, what do you think I should tell her?  When I meet up with her day after tomorrow?  Well, tomorrow now,” he adds, glancing at his discarded wrist comm on the bedside table.

Padme mulls it over.  “Maybe just…listen to her?  Listen to her concerns, and make sure she knows you’re there to support her.  And if you can think of anything, any sort of experience you have with the Dark Side—”

“No, I’ve never had any experience with that,” he cuts her off too roughly, too abruptly, and immediately regrets it.

“Well.”  Padme turns over to give him a pointed look, propping herself up on her elbows so she’s no longer leaning so heavily against his chest.  Yeah, he deserved that.  (Especially because they both know he was lying, but he doesn’t think about that.  He doesn’t.)  “If you have experience with anything analogous to the Dark Side, tell her about that.  Just try to show her that you understand, and then maybe get her talking about options.  Can she stay in the Temple?”

Anakin reclaims the hand that she disentangled from his to turn over, squeezing it in unspoken thanks for her unspoken forgiveness.  “No, it’s not safe.  Not in the long term.”

“Well, if she seems open to it, talk to her about her options.”

He nods.  It’s good advice, really good.  Sometimes he thinks about how much better of a Jedi Padme could’ve been than him, and then he has to pinch himself hard as a reminder not to get upset about stupid things.  Speaking of Padme, they spent most of dinner talking about her latest holodrama obsession, so he still doesn’t know much about what’s happened in her actual life in the last few weeks.  “Enough about my problems, how’s Bail?  Are you two up with anything exciting that’s gonna require a military evac in the near future?”

She rolls away so she can punch him, lightly, on the shoulder.  “Oh, come on, we are not that bad.”

“I’ve got several hundred dead battle droids who would say different.”

“You’re incorrigible,” she sniffs with dignity.  “And yes, actually, I was just talking to Bail about a new bill….”

He keeps the pun to himself in favor of marveling at his angel’s sense of purpose, at the way she talks with her hands, and it doesn’t even occur to him to wonder what color his eyes are this evening.

/B/

The next midmorning, Anakin and Ahsoka go to check in w the 501st at the barracks.  It’s a lovely day on the Coruscant surface, the sun streaming down a cool yellow and the streets clogged with motorists on colorful speeders.  The barracks is only a short walk from the Temple.  On the way over—speaking in cautious terms, of course—Anakin mentions Obi-Wan’s suggestion of joint mediation.

“I mean, we could do that too, Skyguy,” Ahsoka suggests easily.

“Absolutely not!”  Anakin is abruptly enjoying this conversation much less.  “There’s no way you’re not lowering your shields that much in the middle of this war, Ahsoka, especially not for something this pointless.”

“Sure, fine, no sweat,” his padawan acquiesces suspiciously easily.  “It would just be great if we could clear it all up with the Council so you don’t have to wear those things anymore.”  She wrinkles her nose.  “No offense, but you kind of look like a douchebag.”

Anakin touches his glasses self-consciously.  “Who made you the fashion police?”

“Master Vos, last time he visited Obi-Wan.  He had to relinquish the title for an undercover mission, remember?”

“Oh, Force, don’t remind me.”  The conversation dissolves from there.

He’s having trouble meeting her eyes this morning.  Anakin feels bad for not telling her about Barriss, but he promised, and it ultimately is to help her friend.  He doesn’t think she’ll begrudge him the delay, if he’s actually able to convince Barriss to help herself.

Rex greets them at the chrome-plated gate of the barracks, helmet on but radiating happiness in the Force—he always does better on leave, knowing all of his brothers are accounted for and safe.  “Morning, General, Commander!”

“Morning, Rex,” Ahsoka chirps.

“Everything going smoothly?” Anakin adds.

“Yep, everything’s fine for now.  Some of the guys in engineering were hoping to get your eyes on something in the wiring of the new starfighters, but that’ll keep for a few days.”

“Nah, I’ve got time now, might as well get it done,” Anakin responds, failing to conceal his eagerness behind a casual air.  “Snips, you’re good to help Rex with inspections?”

Ahsoka knocks her shoulder hard into his, pride warring with irritation on her face.  “Yeah, I got it,” she grumbles.  “But don’t think you’re getting away with this.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it!” he calls over his shoulder, already halfway to the hangar.

Two hours later, he rolls himself out from under a starfighter to find Rex looming over him, helmet off, while Screws and Cable squabble over something in the background.  “Inspections are finished,” he reports by way of a greeting.  “Commander Tano asked me to let you know she’s playing sabacc with the Domino Twins, and she may or may not have started a challenge among the vod to be the first to steal those goggles of yours.”

“Kriff, she is a vengeful one,” Anakin says admiringly.  The fashion statement in question is currently hooked onto his belt, since dark glasses aren’t exactly conducive to fine-detail starfighter repair.  He’ll have to put them back on in the hallways—cameras everywhere, even if half of them are conveniently broken.  “How is everyone?  Are the shinies making the most of their leave?”

“They weren’t going to, but Jessie and some of the guys from the 212th got on it, and now they’ve been hungover for a full 15 hours,” Rex manages to say with a straight face.  Then his mood clouds over.  “What about you, did you get your…medical condition…checked out yet?”

Anakin grimaces, leveraging himself up to a sitting position on the boards of the rolling platform.  “Yeah, I got Obi-Wan on it.  Inconclusive.  I’m not sure what else we can do.”  Rex nods, digesting that.  “Wait, that reminds me, though, I’ve got something to ask you.  Have you ever heard anything from the men about General Pong Krell?”

Rex hasn’t been overly cautious around Anakin since the first month or so of his command, when he realized Anakin was more than happy to fudge the numbers on casualty reports away from MIA and toward “dead and accounted for” despite how it affected his own performance ratings.  (It’s not like he’s aiding deserters on purpose.  He’s an engineer, okay?  Notorious for incautious rounding.  Any Jedi with his experience…as a mechanic, would do the same.)  However, when a few select topics come up, Rex’s face still goes impenetrably blank.  This is apparently one of them.  “I hear he’s an incredibly successful campaigner, sir.”

“Worst casualty numbers in the GAR, though.”

“Yes, sir.  That does give some of the boys pause.”

Anakin sighs internally.  He’s going to have to go about this directly, isn’t he.  Well, he’s never been good at subterfuge.  “Rex,” he says, lowering his voice, “We have reason to believe he might be a Sith.”

Rex pales.  “Not like—I mean….”

“I mean an actual Sith,” Anakin responds, vaguely irritated at the implication.  His fingers drift to his glasses against his will, reassuring him they’re still there.

“That—I honestly haven’t heard much.  Unsubstantiated rumors, really, but from what little I have heard, it wouldn’t….I can ask around.”

“Do you mind?  We’re pretty certain, but we need to confirm.”

“Of course, General.”  Rex squints down at him, a hard look in his eyes.  “And…if you don’t mind my asking, what are you planning to do if we get that confirmation?”

Anakin smiles grimly.  “I’ll deal with him, of course.”

Rex nods, satisfied.  “Good luck with that, General.”

/B/

But how is he planning to deal with it?

Inspiration comes that night, in the form of a screaming nightmare.  Anakin’s had them on and off for a long time, worse since the war, a jumble of images, sensations, and odors that would probably be prophetic if there weren’t so much distortion in the Force as of late.  They’re part of the reason he has such strong shields, the durasteel walls that protected a very young, powerful psychic from a planet’s worth of malignance and agony reinforced twice over by a preteen’s desire not to share his nightmares with the several thousand psychics in his immediate vicinity.  Now, his shields protect the dirty, ugly parts of him that lie beneath the surface.  Not that he’s Fa—not that he’s got anything crucial to hide, other than, y’know, the whole secret marriage thing.  That’s not dirty anyway, he sometimes thinks that’s the only good thing about him.  But the fear, the self-disgust, the longing, the rage—all of his normal shitty-Jedi feelings that aren’t, like, okay but they also aren’t, y’know, Sithly.  He’s not that bad.  (Right?)

But anyway, he wakes up from a nightmare in his own Temple quarters around four standard.  He sits on the edge of the bed for awhile, carefully restraining himself from pulling at his hair because as grounding as it is, his mechanical hand always catches chunks by mistake.  Then he shuffles silently to the kitchen for a cup of water (Togruta have good hearing) before finally feeling calm enough to lie back down again, uncomfortably clammy from sweat and the feeling of his heart finally easing off from the kriffing spree it went on while his brain wasn’t paying attention.  It’s during this period, staring at the low, white-painted ceiling and thinking idly about everything and nothing, that it occurs to him.  What if they don’t have to reveal Pong Krell?  What if Anakin can make him reveal himself?  He unintentionally shared his nightmares with Obi-Wan and their hallmates many a time in his youth, when his shields were weaker; what if he could do it deliberately with Pong Krell, deprive him of sleep and torment him with anxieties until he snaps and his emotions betray him?

Gosh, that’s actually a really great plan.  Wonder if anyone’s ever tried it.

He can’t see anything wrong with the idea, and Rex’s investigation is really just to confirm what they already know, so he might as well start trying now.  He only has so many days of leave left, after all, and they need to expose Krell before he reassumes command in the field.  If it turns out that there was some mistake, or Barriss lied, and Rex reports back that Krell’s men actually love him, then Anakin can just stop; it’s not like a few bad dreams are gonna kill the guy.  But how to go about it?

Experimentally, Anakin thins his shields by a hair, letting his Force awareness trickle out in a subtle stream.  Soon every life force in the Temple has a foot in his metaphysical puddle, sending quiet ripples back to him and to each other as they breathe in their sleep, burn the midnight oil, or in the case of the nocturnal species go peacefully about their “day.”  His “puddle” is, of course, submerged in the “ocean” of the Force, simultaneously continuous and contiguous with it in the manner of a drop of oil in a water tank.  Anakin used to be a lake in the Force, way back in his infancy before he began to suspect he was a person (and before his suspicions were disconfirmed).  Since then, he’s trained hard for the ability to keep in what most Jedi spend their lives struggling to put out.

He lets his consciousness drift on the currents, focusing in on each of the more turbulent, clamorous ripples in turn, until he catches a whiff of something rotten in the water.  He zeroes in immediately—yes, it’s Krell, asleep and dreaming halfway across the Temple, and something is definitely wrong with his Force signature.  There’s anger there, but also more than a tinge of cruel, sadistic pleasure that reminds Anakin unpleasantly of Tatooine.  Barriss’ signature doesn’t feel at all like that, when he checks Krell against her now.  Beneath a deceptively thin-feeling calm facade, she’s all fear-and-anger-and-grief-and-and-longing-and- questions , but no cruelty, at least not yet.

So Krell.  Yeah, he’s definitely going down.

Banishing sleep for the moment, Anakin sinks deeper into the Force, taking a moment to “eye” his prey’s vibrations like a krayt dragon on the hunt.

Slowly, steadily, he begins.

Chapter Text

At planetary noon the next day, Anakin slinks out a side entrance of the Temple and makes his way to Dex’s as inconspicuously as a six-foot humanoid dressed in all black like a children’s action movie character, who also happens to be a famous general, can.  The sun is bright, again, at least until he makes his way a couple of levels down to where the roaring of speeders above and below echoes and fills the dimmer space with an omnipresent vibrating growl.  

CoCo Town doesn’t have the most welcoming atmosphere ever, and neither does Dex’s run-down, squat, gunmetal gray building—at least until you try the food.  Then it looks like paradise in a scrapyard, which is itself pretty close to paradise for a savvy engineer.  But Anakin isn’t surprised that Barriss looks wary and off-kilter when she pushes hesitantly through the door.

Anakin waves and calls a deliberately casual greeting from the booth he’s occupied, then stands to lead her to the ordering window.  Dex greets him magnanimously as always.  “Little Ani!  Always nice to see one of Obi-Wan’s little ones in here.”

“I’m 21, Dex, and Ahsoka is my little one, not Obi’s,” Anakin fires back good-naturedly.  “I’ll have my usual, and—Barriss?  Any dietary restrictions?”

Barriss looks a little overwhelmed, her face set in a mask of calm but her eyes flicking rapidly between Dex and the signboard menu to the right of his window.  Makes sense: Luminara doesn’t seem like the type to take her padawan somewhere like this outside of a mission.  His impression of Luminara is a mixed bag.  She’s a stone-cold badass, and he has to respect that, but he cannot condone her willingness to abandon her padawan and his beneath the rubble back then.  Anakin thinks of her as a good Jedi and maybe even, under normal circumstances, a good person—but probably not a good master.

Taking pity, he points atDex’s take on moskrat rolls on the menu board.  “I recommend those if you’re good with meats from the Third Low Quadrant.”

Barriss nods seriously, and offers a little half bow to Dex as she says, “I’ll have the Number 6, please.”

The Besalisk roars with laughter, leaning out over the counter to confirm which dish is the Number 6.  “I like this one, Ani, so polite!  What’s your name, dear?”

Barriss looks panicked.  “She’s a friend of Ahsoka’s,” Anakin takes over for her, shooting Dex a significant look that he…probably doesn’t catch through the sunglasses.  “I’m helping her out with a project, thought I’d introduce her to the best diner on Coruscant in the process.”

Dex grins at the flattery and nods in acknowledgment of the unspoken request for discretion.  “I won’t keep you any longer then.  You’re number eight, it’ll be out in five!”

Anakin and Barriss bow their thanks and head for their booth.  Only two other booths are occupied, two humanoids chatting near the door and three sketchy-looking Rodians arguing in low tones against the opposite wall, so Barriss and Anakin’s booth in the middle is well isolated from prying ears, and also pleasantly well-lit by the smudgy but wide windows above.

Barriss slides into the left side of the booth and starts fiddling with the loose fabric of her dark sleeves.  She opens her mouth, then closes it, evidently unsure of how to begin.  Anakin preempts her, trying for a smile.

“So, which classes are you taking this trimester?”

“Um.”  She’s thrown off-guard.  “...Advanced Philosophy III, Interworld Cultures II, a couple of medical ones?”

“Oh, kriff, tell me you don’t have Advanced Philosophy with Master Po-ti-ada?”

She starts.  “Ah, yes.  They’re….”

“Literally the worst, yep,” Anakin voices her politely unspoken implication, and is gratified to see her shoulders relax slightly.  Their order comes up.  It’s retrieved from Dex and inhaled by Anakin, picked at by Barriss until she realizes how incredible Dex’s moskrat rolls are, and then still picked at, but with a little more enthusiasm.  He manages to keep a stilted conversation going about her teachers that he remembers from his own padawanship until she finishes the rolls, sipping at his water when his own meaty salad is done.  He and Obi-Wan had a rule when he was a kid: important discussions came after mealtimes.  Mostly because Anakin became, in Obi-Wan’s words, “an ornery little beast when he was hungry.”  

“So.”  He gives her a chance to finish sipping her water, and then drums his metal fingertips purposefully on the table.  “Down to business.”

“Yes.”

“I think I have a general idea, but do you mind explaining to me how…this”—he waves, indicating her eyes and just kind of her general person—“happened?  When did you start having doubts?”

She sighs, and, not meeting his eyes, she tells her tale.  It’s about what you’d expect.  She’d always had an affinity for the library, and as a result, she’d gained maybe too much access for her own good.  As the war wore on, she started researching heterodox and then Dark practices as she despaired more and more at the limits of her healing, tempted by rumors of ancient Darksiders reviving the dead.  “Then one day, I looked in the mirror and….”  He winces; that’s a bit too close to home.

For a long time, she despaired.  Considered turning herself in, but couldn’t bring herself to face everyone she’d ever loved and see them horrified.  (She talks like a Jedi; he infers the emotional parts.)  Clung to that one enticing possibility, the reasoning—or perhaps rationalization—that had animated her research in the first place: The possibility that the Sith Code was what was evil and corruptive, not necessarily the Dark Side.  “There must be a doctrine that allows you to draw on the Dark Side generatively, not destructively,” she insists, eyes burning darkly above the tattoos on her nose.  He can just see the yellow past her secondary eyelids, now, if he looks closely.  She pauses; a hesitance creeps into her eyes.  “Do you think I’m insane, Master Skywalker?”

On instinct, he looks around for eavesdroppers.  Seeing none, he makes sure she can hear the sincerity in his voice, radiates it in the Force, as he answers quietly, carefully, and honestly, “No, I don’t think so.  I think the Jedi are wrong about a lot of things, and this could very well be one of them.”

It’s like he can see the tension drain from her small, serious frame.  She gives him a wide-eyed look, and then grabs her water glass and gulps down a mouthful like an alcoholic.  It clacks when she sets it back on the table.  “Really?”

“Yep.”  But….  He measures his next words even more, if possible.  “Are you sure this is a safe path for you to be going down, though?  As a kid?”

Barriss looks affronted.  “I’m old enough to be on the battlefield, Master Skywalker.”

“No, I just mean”—he doesn’t, neither she nor Ahsoka is old enough for the battlefield, but that’s another issue—“even if there is a right path out there, finding it…you’re putting yourself at risk in a lot of ways, in the middle of a war that’s already trying its hardest to kill us all.  Even if you have doubts about the Code, wouldn’t it be better to wait until you’re a knight, with a little more freedom, and privacy, to look into this?  I know you want to heal, but can you…afford to put yourself at even more risk?  Right now?”  Ugh, he’s not saying this right.

Now she just looks confused.  Her hand drifts back up to play with her headscarf, clearly a nervous tic.  “I—well, the damage is already done, isn’t it?”

“...What do you mean?”  Mutual incomprehension.  He hurries to clarify, “I’m talking about returning to the Light, just for a little while.  Until you’re in a good position to go further with this.”  And an adult, hopefully.

If anything, she looks even more confused.  “No, the scholarship is very clear.  You can’t go back once you’ve Fallen.  Not without a total mind-wipe.”

What?   “That’s, just—it’s just not true.”  No way.  There’s no way he’s literally been a secret Sith for a full two years without knowing.

“You know from personal experience?”  Suddenly, she’s a few inches closer, leaning over the table with shining eyes belying her habitual reserve.  “Because you are like me.  I knew it.”

“What?  No, I am not a Sith!” he hisses, frustration rising in his gut.  He sees an Obi-Wannish expression cross her face, waves impatiently.  “Sith, Darksider, whatever!”

“How do you know?  You have the eyes.”

“The eyes are unrelated.”

She raises one eyebrow.  Force, she really is like a miniature Obi-Wan, refuses to be convinced.  He takes a deep breath and lets it out, tries to address this rationally.  “I know I’m not a Sith because I haven’t Fallen.”

“Clearly you have, though.”  She’s getting frustrated too.

“No, I’m telling you, people can have yellow eyes for other reasons.”

“From birth, maybe, but appearing in middle age like that?”

Middle age?!  “I—”

“How do you know you haven’t Fallen?”

“Because I’ve Fallen before, okay?” Anakin snaps, and then immediately regrets it.

Barriss is motionless for a moment, eyes wide.  “You’ve Fallen before?”

He sighs, instantly exhausted just from thinking about that night.  The grief tears at his throat, a subtle but penetrating pang.  Two years’ talons.  “Yes, and it felt way different than this,” he affirms in a low voice.

She pauses, jaw firming, and draws back slightly.  “And did you…?”

“No, I didn’t do anything unforgivable.”  Un-Jedi-like, maybe.  Prosecutable, possibly, but with very little chance that anyone would ever bother.

She’s leaning forward on the table again, likely unconsciously.   “Please, tell me.”

Underneath it, he hears, Please.  Help me.

Kriff.

Kriff, kriff.  He doesn’t want to talk about this.  Why should he talk about this?  He doesn’t owe her anything.

But she’s looking at him with big eyes, uncharacteristically vulnerable.  Ahsoka’s friend, she’s basically Ahsoka’s age.  And there’s that desperation that he’s been sensing from the beginning.  Beneath her cool facade, she’s terrified by what’s been happening to her.  She survived losing her faith in the Code, she survived losing her faith in everything she once believed in.  But she’s terrified of losing herself, too.  She needs a Code.  She needs a framework, or she knows she’s going to spiral off into the stratosphere, into a black hole.  Into a place you can’t come back from.

Anakin can relate to that.

Kriff, kriff, kriff.  Shit.  Fuck.   Is he really going to do this?  Talk about this, talk about his—to some snot-nosed kid?

She’s not just some kid, she’s Ahsoka’s closest friend.  And she’s balancing on the knife edge of something…extremely dangerous.

Shit.

Okay, he tells himself abruptly, you’re doing this.  It’s a habit he’s developed, making a decision quickly so he can’t back out of it.  Sometimes you can only move forward by throwing yourself off the cliff.  Okay.

It’s just one more battle.

Just one more difficult thing.

The first words come out halting, gruff.

“It was the grief,” he begins, staring at his mismatched hands on the table.  Hidden under the gloves, but he’s always aware.

“I’d just found my—my mother, she raised me until I was nine.  I don’t know if you would know that.  And when I came to the Temple, I left her behind, and she was…not safe.

“So when I was nineteen, I started having these—well that’s not important, what’s important is I went back for her, finally, with—by myself, without my Master.  I was still a padawan, I abandoned a mission.  And I went back to finally see my mom again, but she’d been…taken.

“There’s a species, on my planet.  The waking nightmare of Tatooine.  Tusken raiders.  Desert dwellers, but there was always conflict, with—with the city folk.  With the moisture farmers.  About water, always about water, except it wasn’t, really.  I don’t know what it was about.

“So my mom was living with a moisture farmer, and one day they took her.  By the time I got to her, she’d been there two weeks.  She’d been—torture.  You know.  Like the Seppies, but—anyway.

“When I found her, she was just barely alive.”  He has to pause here, take a breath, clear his airways.  He can’t drag his eyes off the table, but he feels her silence, her attention, like a weight on his neck.  “She—didn’t make it, and I needed to take the, the—take her away, for burial.  And I needed revenge.  And that’s when it happened, I think.”

He stops for a long time there, because he has to think about this next part.  Of course, he’s gone over this moment in his head for two years, lying on his bed in the dead of night, on the battlefield watching brothers’ blood spill onto sand, their leg or hand blasted a foot away, accusing him, accusing him by the distance….  But putting it into words is different.  And anyway, he’s mostly thought about what came before.  He’s thought about this part really just as a sidebar to trying to decide if he should feel guilty or grateful for what happened next.

He must be silent for too long, because Barriss’ disembodied voice prompts him.  Hushed, a bit uncomfortable.  “And then…?”

“I think it was the grief,” he repeats himself, abrupt and too loud.  He hears her shift back in surprise and tones it down.  “It was…tempting.  I was tempted, to put the…sadness aside.  Put my mom aside.  Anger is…you know, it’s easier.  Revenge, is.  It’s easier.”

He senses more than sees her nod, slowly.  She understands.  That part, she understands.

“But that would be—it would.  She was right there.  That would be putting my mom aside.  I would’ve had to—to leave her there, in the tent, while I did it.”  He hears his voice crack on leave, forces himself to take one slow breath and then pick it back up.  He’s an adult.  He’s a general, a Jedi knight, offering a lesson to a padawan who needs it.  “I would’ve had to leave her there.  And it would have been disrespectful.  After everything.  She—after everything she gave me, it would have been disrespectful not to grieve her.”

The space behind his eyes is hot, and he’s almost choking on the lump in his voice, but he will not cry, he refuses.  He needs to get to the end, he’s not telling this for him.  This isn’t about him.  This is about Ahsoka’s friend being sixteen and lost, and it’s about giving her something to hold onto, to tear into, to grip with bloody fingertips when she needs it the most.

One more battle.  One more difficult thing.

“And I think that’s…the reason, I didn’t do something…do something.  Awful.  Something my mom wouldn’t have approved of, because she was—she wouldn’t have allowed it.  Revenge within reason.  I killed everyone who came running for the tent, when they saw me, and didn’t feel confused in the Force.  The ones who felt….  They knew she was there.  And I killed everyone who tried to stop me from taking her with me.  And I left.  That’s it.  Excuse me.”

He stands up abruptly from the table and strides fast, but not too fast, to the ‘fresher.  Takes a minute to rest his hands on the sink, stare at the taps, hold himself together with iron bands.  Two minutes.  He thinks of Padme, makes himself think of their engagement, their wedding, makes the flashes of blood and darkness sink back into the turbulence of his hindbrain.  Slowly, the lump in his throat melts away.

He feels exhausted, like he just ran ten miles.  Like he just finished a battle.  But also—lighter, in a strange way.

It made it easier, that she wasn’t Obi-Wan, or Ahsoka, he realizes.  A near-stranger.  And a near-stranger who wouldn’t, couldn’t, judge him, who didn’t have the right to judge him, because she’s like him too.  There’s someone who understands.

He waits until he feels fully in control of himself again and heads back to the table.  Slides back into the booth, puts on a cocky smile, and forces himself to look her in the eyes instead of staring at the tattoos over her nose.  “So, what did we learn, Padawan?  You got an A-1 case study right there of what dabbling in the Dark Side really means, in my humble opinion.  Gimme your take.”

She nods slowly.  He can tell she’s giving it thought, looking down and away as she considers what he’s given her.  It’s—respectful.  It warms something in him.

“So it was…you said.  You said your grief…tempered your anger.  And it was tied to atta—to love.  But the anger wasn’t…wrong.”  She meets his eyes, serious, searching for confirmation.  Force, she really is a padawan, isn’t she.

He shifts uncomfortably.  “The Jedi—”

“I know what the Jedi would say,” she cuts him off aggressively, and then clearly catches herself and lowers her eyes with her voice.  “I mean.  I apologize.  But in that situation.  In that situation….”  She takes a breath.  When she continues, her voice is so low he has to strain to hear it, and hard.  Firm.  “I think you were right.  I think you were right to be angry.  Somebody—somebody needed to be angry.  For her.”  A little uncertainty creeps back into her voice.  “Right?”

She meets his eyes again, more desperate this time.  Slowly, he nods, that thing in his chest warming further at her words.  “Yes.  Like the whole—when there’s an injustice.”  For all that they’re almost whispering now, his next words drop from his tongue like lead weights, like a sentence of death.  They’re heavy, so heavy.  But honest.  “I do think it can be right to act in anger,” he admits, and it feels like a final confession.

He sees her eyes spark at his answer.  “Like the clones,” she ventures softly, fiercely.

Anakin sighs, because that’s not quite what he was about to say but yes, it’s absolutely near the top of his list.  “Yeah.  Like the clones.”

She smiles involuntarily, a quick bitter thing responding to whatever she sees in his eyes, before she seems to realize how she’s leaning forward, resting on her elbows with her hands clasped.  She shifts back, sitting straight again with her hands primly on the table.  Back to the perfect Jedi, even during a discussion whose entire point is heresy.  “So, the anger wasn’t wrong,” she resumes her line of thought from before.  “But it needed to be tempered by grief, and love, or you think you would have done something you’d regret.”

He shifts his shoulders, leaning back more in his seat.  He has to admit, it feels really weird to have this experience summarized like that by an outsider.  So clinically, so objectively.  It doesn’t feel like something that can ever be objective, and yet—“…Essentially, yes.”

She unfolds her hands, lets them rest loosely on the metal table, eyes far away.  “So maybe drawing on the Dark Side without losing control is about…maybe, not letting yourself be dominated by one negative emotion?  Feeling everything that…should be felt, demands to be felt, feeling it fully and completely, but not letting yourself be blinded by one passion.  Balancing passion with passion.”  He notices her right pointer finger absently tracing some sort of pattern on the table.  She’s not looking at it though, her eyes are still narrowed in thought, gazing past him in the general direction of Dex’s toaster oven.  Thinking critically about this in a way he never would’ve thought to, if he even could.  “And also…letting those passions go, when they’re spent.  Feeling when it’s appropriate, then letting go when it’s appropriate.”

Anakin thinks about that.  “I don’t know if letting go is a term I’d use.  Uh, maybe—”  He stops.  He can’t think of how to put it into words.  As usual, his tongue is clumsy, just another crude muscle in his mouth though it’s silver in everyone else’s.  He’s no orator, he doesn’t explain, doesn’t negotiate.  Especially not in Basic.

Maybe it’s the last thought that triggers it, or the general subject matter of the last half hour, or the way he sank a little deeper into the Force to help calm himself down back in the ‘fresher, but a phrase floats to the surface at the back of his mind, cool to the touch and tarnished from long residence in those dark waters, but with a tinge still of the sacred to the way it ripples the waves.  He takes a moment to translate it into Basic.

“There’s—there is a time for rain,” he says lowly.

When he was a child, he would hear it everywhere, from slave and master alike: the common refrain of Tatooine.  Don’t waste your water.  He remembers his mother telling him this, when he was very young and hurting and tired, and the heat rose to the backs of his eyes.  She would grip his shoulders firmly and look into his eyes with infinite compassion, but durasteel firmness as well.  An unstoppable force, an immovable object.  I know, I know, it hurts, little one, she’d tell him.  But we can’t waste the water.

But that refrain had a correlate.  Not often spoken, not so useful in everyday life, but you could hear it in the snatches of songs people sang, in the rapping of knuckles on a door in the night, in the half-religious, half-believed pseudo-prophecies passed around the slave quarter like threadbare blankets.  There is a time for rain.

“I think it’s….” Anakin puzzles aloud.  For a moment, he almost forgets his audience.  It’s just him, submerged in an endless dark ocean, impersonable, non-personized, and yet practically buzzing with anticipation.  “There are priorities.  You’re never not going to feel anything, but there’s a time to go forward, and a time to go around.  There’s a time for revenge, and a time for grief.  And a time for remembrance.”

She tilts her head slightly, her dark hood shifting with the movement.

“So I guess it’s not so much letting go as…letting one emotion make way for another.  Giving each its time and place, and then letting it yield its place seamlessly when another arises.”

“So not dwelling on anything,” Barriss interprets, nodding.  “Not letting yourself be dominated by one passion over time, as well as in time.”

“Yeah, that sounds right.”  Huh.  He’s…not actually a good model for that one, when you think of it that way.  But it does sound right.

Yeah, actually.  In the Force.  It sounds right.

They sit there in silence for a minute, processing.  Anakin reaches over and steals one of the cast-aside tuber fries that came with her meal.  Regretfully, he realizes this has taken too long.  Any longer away from the Temple, and someone might start to suspect.

“Did that…help?” he hazards, prompting her to zone back in from the place she zoned out to.  “Do you feel like you know how to manage this, now?  A little bit better?”

“…Yes, I think so,” she answers, measured.  “Thank you, Master Skywalker.”  The sincerity in her voice rings clearly in her Force presence, shielded as it is.  “Can I…is it alright if I comm you, if anything happens?”

“Yes, absolutely, please do.  Or if you have any more questions you want help working through.”  He hesitates.  “I do need to ask you for something in return, though.”

She looks up quickly.  “What?”

“Will you tell Ahsoka?  Or I can.  She’ll want to help.”  And he still wants her to know to be on guard.  Just in case.

He sees the hunted, desperate look resurge in Barriss’ eyes—but then she stops, takes a breath.  There’s a new resolve in the set of her jaw when she nods.  “Yes.  I owe that, to you and to her.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll do it tonight.  In the library, the same room.  Can you—let her know I’ll meet her at 7?  I’ll tell her myself, but….”  But Ahsoka trusts him more.  And that way he knows exactly where they’ll be and when.  So he can put himself in a position to intervene immediately, just in case she was lying all along, and means to hurt Ahsoka. It’s thoughtful of her.  Force, he’s liking this kid more and more—Fallen Jedi or not, he can’t help thinking she must be a great influence on his impulsive padawan.

“Sure, I’ll pass it on,” he says easily.  “And uh.  Just one piece of advice—atmosphere is important, as my master used to tell me.  So uh.  Maybe turn the lights on this time around?”

She blushes a darker green, but smiles ever so slightly.  “Ah.  Yes, will do.”

/B/

That night, he lurks in a different room on the same floor and monitors his bond with Ahsoka while Barriss breaks the news.  He registers shock, fear (that causes a spike in his own heart rate, but it lessens in intensity before he has grounds to intervene), confusion, worry, and finally, after a while, a hesitant thread of determination.  Ahsoka makes a beeline for him as soon as she leaves Barriss’ little secret-sharing room, clearly aware of his presence all along.  She walks in alone, looking dazed but unhurt.  He resists the urge to put an arm around her shoulders, instead projecting reassurance in the Force.  “Master?  Barriss—she—well, she said you know….”

“Yeah, she caught a glimpse of the uh, under the glasses and thought I was also…yeah.  Talked to her about it while you were in class.”  That twinge of guilt intrudes again.  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you immediately.”

She shakes her head, montrals shifting.  They’re not as stubby as they used to be, and she’s not so short.  “No, don’t worry, she told me she asked you not to.  But….”  She crosses her arms protectively in front of her, hunching her shoulders.  “Is she…you think we can trust her?” she says very quietly.  “You think she’s still….”

Now Anakin actually does pull her into a hug, rubbing her back comfortingly when she reciprocates.  “I think we can, yeah,” he murmurs into the ridge of her montrals.  “I want you to be careful, though.”  He pulls back, leaves his hands on her shoulders as he catches her eyes seriously.  “You’ve known her longer than me.  Do you think she still seems trustworthy?”

She thinks about it for a long time, he’s gratified to see.  “…Yeah, I do,” she finally says thoughtfully.  “But I think she needs help.  I want to help her.”

He smiles.  What a good kid.  “Then that’s what we’ll do.”

“Okay.  Yeah.  Okay, we can deal with this,” Ahsoka responds, taking heart from the surety in his tone.  Then she pouts, a spark of humor softening her worried expression.  “But if anyone else around here turns out to have secret yellow eyes, I’m quitting the Jedi and moving to Naboo.”

Anakin cringes.  “Uh.  Actually, about that.”

She stares at him for a moment, claps a hand to her forehead.  “…Are you kidding me?”

/B/

Speaking of which.  Obi-Wan comms him after lunch the next day, while Anakin is lounging on the sunny couch in his and Ahsoka’s quarters, finishing up some of the never-ending stream of datawork that comes with running a war on his desk.  (Never-ending even when he delegates almost all of it to Rex; it’s ridiculous.)  Ahsoka is in class, so there’s no one to disturb when he thumbs the “accept call” button.  “Skywalker speaking.”

“Anakin, I’ve done a thorough review of our mutual friend’s activities and communications—discreetly, of course—and there’s no sign that he’s had any communications with outside sources.  Whatever he may be, he’s not actively a Separatist,” Obi-Wan’s crisp accent raps out.

“Really?”  Anakin is surprised.  He’s been in Krell’s head for the last two nights, slipping through the hairline cracks in his shields that grow with each hour of sleep lost to Anakin’s disruptions, and while he can’t exactly read anything specific that way, he’s at least convinced that Krell is a nasty customer.  To the core.

“However, I also reviewed all casualty statistics since his first deployment.  They are—”  He coughs.  “Well, they’re really quite something.  I don’t know how his legion general has continued to allow this.  Even if he is winning every engagement, I honestly can’t rule out deliberate self-sabotage.”  That kriffing barve.   “Even if it’s not, he doesn’t…well, he can’t be leading like a Jedi,” Obi-Wan says slowly.

“So you think…?”

“…Maybe.”  He hesitates.  “But there’s not enough to accuse him.”

Anakin almost tells Obi-Wan, “I might have a way to take care of him,” but something holds him back.  “Got it.  Thanks for looking into that.”

“Of course.  I’ll bring his numbers to the Council’s attention; best not to mention the other part, I think, if it’s unsubstantiated.  But his statistics are certainly enough for us to talk to him, at least.”

Just talk to him?  Anakin’s face twists, and a spark of anger ignites in his gut.  He’s about to point out how ineffectual that is—but it’s beside the point, he realizes, since he’s going to take care of it himself anyways.  He snuffs the spark.  “Sounds good, Obi-Wan.”

“Don’t forget the long-term contingency meeting on the Sieges tomorrow.”

“Oh, yeah, I’ll be there.  See you then.”

“You’d better,” his master says with a smile in his voice.  “Kenobi out.”  The comm light blinks off.

Hmm.  Anakin has some more planning to do.  But first, he needs more information.

Conveniently, or perhaps by the will of the Force, he’s only about twenty minutes out from his conversation with Obi-Wan when he gets a live comm from Rex.  “General!  Some of the men and I are heading to 79’s tonight, are you free?”

Anakin is confused for a moment, and then instantly on guard.  He and Rex are friends, at this point, and he and Ahsoka have gone out for beers (and a melon-ade) with members of the command class or Torrent Company plenty of times, but 79’s is for the clones.  The only reason Rex would invite him there is to say something that needs to be protected from prying ears.

“Yeah, absolutely,” he answers easily.  “Everything’s fine with the men?”

“We’re all good over here, sir.  I did look into that issue you asked about, I’ll tell you about it this evening.”

Thank the Force, this is about Krell.  “Sounds good, Captain, I’ll see you at 1900?

“Affirmative, General.”  Rex ends the call.

Evening is a much better time for sneaking around when you’re a six-foot humanoid dressed entirely in black.  On the other hand, it makes his sunglasses far more inconvenient and far less socially acceptable.  He almost gets hit by a speeder twice on the way there.  Rex meets him in the dark street outside, in partial armor and holding his helmet on his hip.  Pink and red light filters through the blinds, accompanied by the muffled sounds of Mandalorian electronic music and identical voices layered over each other, occasionally building to create the impression of one massive, grumbling low voice before dissolving back into a dull murmur.

Rex ushers Anakin down the building’s side alley—no need to alarm the brothers by pushing through the main floor—and in through a nondescript door to a back room.  The room is small, maybe five by five yards, with surprisingly classy faux wood wainscoting over light beige plaster.  It’s more of an entryway than a room, dim from the one light overhead and without furniture, and they can still faintly hear the thumping beat and chatter from the bar proper through a few thin walls.

“Krell is a monster.”  Rex skips the preamble.  The set of his face is deadly serious.

“Shit.”  Anakin lets out a slow breath.  “He’s killing his men on purpose?”

“Captain I talked to says he’s got a pattern.  Throws away forty, fifty lives at the start of any battle on useless offensives and suicide missions before he actually starts trying to win, and then wins by the most brutal strategy possible.  Off the field, too, he’s kriffing tyrannical, enforces all the Kaminoan rules of conduct and more, refers to everyone by their numbers and punishes anyone he catches using a brother’s name.  Punishes ‘em for anything he can, really.”  Rex declines to elaborate on the nature of these punishments, but Anakin can imagine; the knowledge crawls down to the base of his spine.

“Shit,” he says again, because what else is there to say?  “How did the Council not find out about this?  How did his legion general not know?”

“Apparently he deliberately recruits shinies rather than transfers, brothers who’ll think that kind of treatment is normal.  Plus intimidation, he monitors a lot of internal and external communications.  And….”

“And he got results, so no one wanted to question it,” Anakin says heavily.  “Fucking Council.”

“What’s the plan for dealing with him?”

Ah, a happier topic.  In the face of Rex’s pain and rage, muddying the Force around them, he’s glad he has a good answer for once.  “I’m gonna slowly drive him insane with constant nightmares until he reveals himself, then make sure somebody stabs him in the neck,” Anakin explains proudly.

A pause.  Rex looks both impressed and mildly concerned.  “Well, it’s…creative, I’ll give you that.  Although mind games are usually General Kenobi’s thing.  You think you can get him to snap before his leave ends?”  Krell is scheduled to ship out two days before the 501st, so only a little more than a week from now.  There’s no way they can expose Krell’s troops to an even more erratic, violent general than they’re used to on campaign.

“That is a concern.  I’m thinking of asking for help.  Taking it in shifts.”  Hopefully, Rex assumes he means Obi-Wan.

“Hmm.”  Rex’s fingers tap-tap-tap on his helmet.  “He’s got troop inspections scheduled in two days.  I can try and get his legion in on it—move things around, swap numbers, make him doubt his own perceptions.”

“Is that safe?”

Rex hisses through his teeth, considering.  “Not really, but from what I hear, neither is serving under him on a normal day.  And they hate his guts, I’m surprised no one’s—”  He cuts himself off, but again, Anakin gets the picture.

“I guess if I can get him to the point where he’s already doubting himself, he won’t be as likely to figure it out.”

Rex nods.  “I’ll pass on the message, see what they can do.”

“Thanks, Rex.”  Anakin claps him on the shoulder as they turn to head back out.  “Tell your source I appreciate his bravery.”  He pauses, considers.  “And that we’re gonna get this sleemo.  In the most painful way possible.”

It’s an un-Jedi-like sentiment, but Rex seems to appreciate it.  He returns a feral, angry grin.  “Oh, I believe it, General.”

/B/

Apparently Krell’s battalion managed to rearrange all the signage in their compound to lead Krell, searching for the officers’ barracks, on a long and winding journey around the entire compound that ended right back where it started.  A team of commandos following just out of sight switched and reinstalled everything so that when he tried to condemn his men for the incompetence of their signage, this time, the signs led directly and obediently to his straight-faced, politely skeptical commander’s office.  During barrack inspections, someone hid a dead womprat in his blaster holster so the faint smell of rotting flesh followed Krell from bunk to bunk, with no perceivable source.  The officers switched their designation numbers mid-report.  The shinies rearranged the furniture in the main briefing room every time he stepped out.  As soon as they noticed how uncharacteristically jumpy he was, Krell’s whole battalion started strategically dropping toolboxes and other heavy objects to make loud bangs when he least expected it.  A few brave soldiers managed to repeatedly slip a drop of soap into his caf, no matter how many times he washed or replaced his cup.

Ahsoka, stationed a safe distance from the Temple entrance right after Rex passed on the message that Krell was returning, reports that he was in such a state of distraction upon entry that he almost got in a fight with the guards.  Rex relays the additional message that that was the most fun the 246th Battalion has had since the beginning of the war, and to a man, they can be counted on for their discretion.  Force, everything they’ve been through and they’re still obviously such cheeky bastards—Anakin is going to get them transferred to the Open Circle Fleet if it kills him.

Anakin continues waging his own covert war every night, and also begins to subtly unbalance Krell during the day.  He light-fingers Krell’s datapad while he’s in the training salle and copies his schedule for the rest of leave.  Thus armed, he saunters into the back of the large, sparsely-populated meditation room Krell is using a few hours later, sits down politely on a cushion in the back, and starts experimenting with how to project low-level psychic disturbance directly at Krell without alerting anyone else in the room.  It takes some time and a few disapproving looks from the two Mon Cal Jedi along the right-hand wall, but he eventually figures out that it works best when he dwells on something that makes him disturbed, and then channels his Force presence into more of a…river, or maybe a moat, than a puddle, a few layers deep in the Force, extending to envelop Krell deep enough to be beneath his awareness, and avoiding the presences of anyone else.  There’s probably a bit of psychic runoff perceptible to others, but Krell should be the only one feeling the full force of the current tugging subtly at his ankles.

Anakin settles in and peacefully, deliberately meditates on his various sources of worry, one by one, over the course of an hour.  (In the process, he’s surprised to note how many of those he has.  It’s a lot more than he realized.)  He spills anxiety out into the channel he’s dug between himself and Krell until it’s swirling in a shallow, acidic pool at the very base of Krell’s shields, just below his conscious perception.  He feels Krell grow more and more frustrated, shifting on his cushion as he struggles and fails to find the peace of mind that would allow him to sink into meditation.  The Mon Cal Jedi are shooting dirty looks at Krell now, not Anakin.  Finally, after about an hour, Krell surges to his feet with a growl deep in his throat and storms out of the room, robe fluttering behind him.

Anakin smiles and takes another half hour to regain his center before rising serenely, bowing to the other Jedi, and heading out himself.

/B/

In this manner, the second week of Anakin’s leave begins.  Training with Ahsoka, strategy meetings, and a few more skill seminars interfere, but he manages to put in an hour or two a day of psychic sabotage.  There are a lot of Jedi in the Temple, and Anakin doesn’t have to be in the same room as Krell to target him this way, so he’s pretty sure Krell doesn’t even suspect him yet.  And all along, the target is marinating nicely in the artfully applied juices of paranoia, rage, and exhaustion.  If Anakin were running this op on his own timeline, he would maintain this level of pressure for another week, and thereby avoid raising the risk of detection.  Yeah, he tends to be an attack-focused guy, but you don’t rush a covert op unless you have to—Rex taught him that, along with hard experience.

Unfortunately, however, he has a hard deadline.  Three days before Krell’s leave ends, Anakin ups the ante.

He takes to haunting Krell, dogging his steps, making every excuse to be in the same room he’s in and then reestablish his channel or, if he doesn’t have time, just flare his Force signature as bright and turbulent as possible.  Multiple Jedi have told him, especially his peers when he was a kid, that his presence in the Force can be uncomfortable to be around if his shields aren’t in absolutely perfect condition.  He’ll admit he’s gotten into the habit of occasionally using something like these two tactics against Obi-Wan, his only real weapon in wars of words that fall clumsy and defensive from his mouth: Deliberately projecting his feelings at Obi-Wan, forcing him to understand how frustrating he is firsthand.  It’s not something he’s proud of, it’s certainly un-Jedi-like behavior, but now, the experience is actually coming in handy.

He walks in on Krell in an isolated part of the library, pretends to be looking at books, and carefully channels his feelings about keeping his marriage secret from Obi-Wan into a simmering morass in the Force until Krell surges to his feet and storms out of the room.  He claims the next training salle over from Krell and dwells on his guilt over his childhood friends, left behind in that sweltering purgatory, until Krell grips his forehead with a shout and gives up on—oh, not even dueling, Anakin realizes; Krell was trying to take a nap in there.  Anakin sits at the next table over in the refectory and chews moodily, automatically through a sandwich while deliberately ruminating on his failures as Ahsoka’s master, until Krell abandons his dish of sweet corn and Kam’ik squid half-eaten.  It’s something of a kamikaze tactic, he’ll admit, and it certainly doesn’t leave him in a good mood afterwards, but his sunglasses stay firmly on his face and it’s worth it for the effect he can see it having on his adversary.

Krell was already jumpy, irritable, but now he’s gotten downright erratic.  In the end, Anakin didn’t ask Barriss to help him with the actual psychic undermining part—too dangerous for a kid—but she and Ahsoka take to reporting back to him on Krell’s movements and demeanor in their spare time.  He’s only been harrying Krell with this new intensity for a few hours when Barriss brings him a story she heard from a group of padawans—apparently Master Krell dashed into the study room they were using, bowling one of them over in the doorway, and proceeded to chew them out in a long, loud, rambling lecture for being in his way, before apparently forgetting what he wanted to do there and dashing right back out.  Krell is getting more and more paranoid and unbalanced, and the Temple is starting to notice.

Anakin’s tactics aren’t as imperceptible as he’d prefer—any other Jedi who pass by while he’s flaring his signature likely think him rather rude, and he wouldn’t be surprised if much of the Temple is having a vaguely crappy couple of days.  However, they shouldn’t be viewed as too suspicious, either: He already has the reputation, he has reasonable excuses for being in every location he’s done this in, and not many Jedi have actually seen Anakin doing this in Krell’s vicinity, since he’s been making an effort to catch sleemo alone.  It helps that Krell doesn’t really seem to have friends.  Which is understandable.

By two days before his leave ends, Krell has abandoned his schedule entirely, but Barriss and Ahsoka’s covertly texted and immediately erased updates make it possible for Anakin to spend hours upon hours working on him anyway, without any indication that he’s following him.  It’s a time-consuming but surprisingly easy task—he’s falling behind on his datawork, sure, but on the other hand he’s actually gotten pretty good sleep for the last few nights; Krell’s subconscious mind has started replaying Anakin’s nightmares automatically without Anakin having to give it more than an initial nudge each evening.

In no time, it arrives: the last day before Krell’s leave ends.  Krell has become a positive menace in the halls of the Temple, taking his hair-trigger temper out on random padawans and initiates, earning reprimands from multiple senior masters, and in one memorable instance barging into Mace Windu’s meditation class, violently pulling all the window curtains closed in a panicked rush, and then sprinting back out with no explanation.  Anakin has been slowly raising the intensity of his psychic attacks as Krell’s shields have crumbled, and he’s almost certain he has Krell right where he wants him as the moment he’s been waiting for approaches.  His blood is humming with the anticipation of a predator about to spring—or a general, about to close a perfectly executed trap.  Closing his eyes and leaning against the hard marbled wall of an out-of-the-way corridor, burrowed deep in the Force with his awareness extended to encompass half the Temple, he waits.

Finally, finally, he senses Krell storming to the Council chamber, two hours late for his final campaign prep briefing.  (He used Obi-Wan’s credentials to gain access to the all-Temple briefing schedule and confirm the time in Krell’s own calendar, a neat little piece of slicing that shouldn’t be traceable back to him.)  Anakin fast-walks to his planned intercept position and plasters himself behind the corner just as Krell enters the final vibrant-tiled and carpeted antechamber before the Council chamber’s huge doors come into sight.  Ten seconds to intercept.  He breathes deep.  He reinforces his shields one last time, everywhere except the hole that leads directly to the channel he’s dug toward Krell’s weakened mind.  He’s as ready as he needs to be.  Five seconds to intercept.  With effort, he makes himself remember the time from two campaigns ago when he was way too high on stims to make up for the rations he’d slipped Ahsoka and thought for sure they were all going to die in the next attack—one second—and channels one final, mind-bending push, like a mind-trick but with 80 times the power behind it, directly into Krell’s half-shielded mind.

He hears a strangled growl and the thud of something heavy hitting the ground.  He checks around the corner to see the greenish-grey Jedi pushing himself to his feet, clutching at the crests on his head.

Krell is glistening with sweat and missing his outer robe.  His bulbous Besalisk chin jiggles threateningly above eight feet of pure muscle, much of it consolidated in four meaty arms.  Just as he regains his feet, Anakin feels a sting in the Force, and makes to duck back around the corner before Krell can spot him.

They make eye contact through Anakin’s shades.

Oops.

Krell’s eyes widen, and then before Anakin can react, his hand snaps out and seizes Anakin’s left arm in a bruising grip.  Anakin already has his saber unclipped from his belt before he manages to fight his first instinct to cut the sleemo’s arm off.  It takes a great effort not to do it after his first instinct passes, either, because he wasn’t intending to be here for this part, and he spends much of his life trying not to look weak in front of the Council.  But, he figures, his desire for victory wrestling with his wrath, it would look too suspicious to hurt Krell now, and he’s always been good at improvising.  And it’s worth it to look like the victim for a few minutes if it enables you to win.

So he’s only slightly incandescent with rage when Krell drags him, stumbling in his attempts to keep up, through the final antechamber to the Council’s chamber itself.  The doors slide open at a signal from someone inside, and he narrowly avoids falling flat on his ass when Krell hurls him through with all his Besalisk strength before storming in after him.  Krell’s robes are growing more askew by the minute, as he clutches at his temples and takes deep heaving breaths.  He’s practically foaming at the mouth.

The Council looks concerned, to put it mildly.  Some of the younger ones have half risen out of their seats, while those only present in hologram lean in keenly.

“Master Krell?  What are you—what are you doing with Knight Skywalker?”  Shaak Ti looks uncharacteristically lost.

“And what was that disturbance in the Force outside?” Ki-Adi-Mundi adds.

Obi-Wan’s eyes widen across the room, before he pinches the bridge of his nose in exasperation.  He probably thinks Anakin has just said something stupid and offended Krell to the point of distraction.  Little does he know.

Krell makes a noise in his throat that can only be described as a growl, turning to Yoda on his right.  He stands directly between Anakin and the door, putting Anakin closest to Plo Koon, and Saesee Tiin, and Deepa Billaba (in hologram) and Shaak Ti nearest to Krell, at his 4:00.  Coruscant’s sun streams down through the big window behind Yoda, illuminating the scene.

Yoda’s ears flick down subtly when Krell growls wordlessly a second time, eyeing him like he’s lunchmeat instead of the Grandmaster of the Order.  “Pong Krell!  Explain yourself immediately,” Mace Windu’s hologram barks, hovering above the chair to the right of Yoda’s.

Eyes flicking to the hologram, Krell finally opens his mouth.  The voice that emerges is still a low baritone but croakier than usual, with an edge of hysteria accented by the sheer volume at which he raves.  His eye color, however, is still murky brown.  “He is burning me!  This child will not stop burning me in the Force, I cannot—I cannot think, I cannot sleep, I—”

Anakin musters all the innocence he can in his expression, backing away with his open hands on display from the four index fingers pointed accusingly at him.  “Masters, I’m sorry, I don’t know what he’s talking about.  Master Krell and I are only passing acquaintances, I don’t have anything against him,” he says.  Whoops, he thinks, listening to himself.  As it turns out, he can’t exactly manage innocent, but impatient works too.

“He lies!” Krell roars, lurching towards him in a way that has several Council members rising tentatively from their seats.  “He lies, he has been attacking me, I see him in my sleep!  I see him in my sleep, he burns!”

Anakin takes another measured step back.  “Uh.  I know my presence can be a bit—maybe my shields have gotten a bit damaged, since my last campaign?  I apologize if I startled you, but if I did, it was an accident.”  He looks to the gathered Councillors for support.

“Master Krell, this is the Temple.  You’re safe.  No one should be attacking you,” Shaak Ti interjects firmly, rising to her full height with a hand on the hilt of her lightsaber.  “If you’ve been having visions, we can help you with that, or if you want to lodge a complaint against Knight Skywalker, there are channels available to you.”

Krell goes completely still for a moment, and then bursts out into booming, manic laughter.  It sounds compulsive; he bends and almost topples sideways with the force of it.  “ BA-ha-ha-ha-ha!  A complaint!  You want me to lodge a complaint?  Bwah-ha-ha!  I’ll lodge my lightsaber through his miniscule skull!  Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

“Master Krell, this isn’t the battlefield,” Anakin tries.  “Do you think maybe you should see a healer?”  Plo Koon is nodding along in his peripheral vision, surreptitiously pressing a button on his wrist comm.

“I believe that would be wise,” Shaak Ti agrees in a calming tone, slowly making her way toward Krell in the center of the chamber with her palms open.  “Master, will you tell me about this vision you’ve been having?”

Krell’s eyes widen, and he backs away from her.  “No healers!” he bellows at top volume, almost tripping on the waxed tile floor in his haste.  “I will not be treated like a youngling!  I am not ill , it is this—this creature burning me in the Force, stealing my sleep, it was him all along, I know it!”

“The healers, we will not call, if want them, you do not, Master Krell.  Only calm yourself, you must,” Yoda says gravely.  “A path to the Dark Side, anger is.”

Well, there’s not going to be a better moment than this.  Anakin gasps.  “Master Krell, your eyes—!”

Krell visibly startles and erratically searches the room for a reflective surface, displaying his glowing yellow eyes to every single member of the Council in the process.

Across the chamber, lightsabers ignite in a cacophony of fhwooms!

“Pong Krell!  Put down your weapons!”  Mace Windu has gotten extremely close to the holocamera, rendering him essentially just a giant, aggressive blue head.  Anakin ignites his ‘saber as well and backs into the space between Plo Koon and Saesee Tiin’s deserted seats.  He assesses the scene, his victory mixed with a twinge of chagrin.  The entire Council should be able to handle one Sith no sweat, which is why he made this plan in the first place, but he’ll feel horrible if Krell actually manages to kill anybody.

A hand lands on his shoulder, and he almost cuts off an arm for the second time in ten minutes before he registers Obi-Wan’s presence in the Force.  In the chaos, his old master managed to get across the room and come up behind him without him noticing.  “Anakin, are you all right?”

Not willing to risk a wink, Anakin sends a pulse of the emotional equivalent of “Oh, everything’s going just fine” down their bond.  He registers surprise, and then Obi-Wan is removing his hand from his shoulder (he is hyperaware of the warm spot this leaves) and giving him an odd look out of the corner of his eye.

While all this has been going on, Krell has been slowly backing away from the loose circle of seven Councillors, two hands drifting dangerously close to his sabers.  Suddenly, he ignites them both and rushes for the door.  Ki-Adi-Mundi gets there ahead of him, though, forcing him to retreat back into the center of the steadily shrinking circle.

He looks around wildly, and then with a bellow of rage he rushes Plo Koon.  Master Plo deflects his first sally easily, ducking under the overhead saber while repulsing the other with a firm backhand grip, and Krell effectively bounces off the much smaller being and back into the center of the circle, unsteady on his feet.

There are now only about four yards between Master Ti on one side of the circle and Master Plo on the other, all seven Jedi padding forward on silent, predatory feet.  Sabers raised.  Pong Krell twists around unsteadily again, looking for a weak spot, and in that moment Master Ti lunges forward and strikes at his side, cutting a burning line down Krell’s ribs.  As he lunges at her retreating form, Master Yoda bounces forward and takes Krell’s left lower hand from behind.

Krell roars and explodes into movement, his mismatched lightsabers whirring as he deflects attacks from several Council members at once.  For all his wild energy, though, he doesn’t leave a scratch on them.  It’s kind of terrifying.  Jedi usually fight one-on-one duels, but they don’t have any particular compunctions against fighting in numbers, as long as their causes are just.  They just don’t get many chances to do so, spread thin throughout the galaxy as they generally are.  The Council’s seamless teamwork and utter cold-blooded ruthlessness are amazing to behold.  For once, Anakin feels no need or inclination to jump into the fight, lurking in a good position to block the biggest window with his master.

Master Plo’s precise strike takes another hand at the wrist, and this time a saber with it.  The Council backs off slightly then, and the blue head of Mace Windu speaks for them.  “Surrender, Pong Krell.  You can’t win this.”

Krell lets out a roar of rage that morphs into that booming, manic laughter from before.  “Fools!  You’re all fools!  You’re going to lose, I’ve foreseen it!  Another power will rise, a stronger power, it’s risen already and you’re all so blind…but I will see my revenge!” he howls, and then suddenly lunges to the right, breaking through the circle of Jedi at the cost of a horrific burn on his neck and cut to his flank.  His huge head lowers.  His robes flutter behind him in tatters.  He barrels toward Anakin and Obi-Wan like a hyperline train.

A flash of blue, up to the left.  One of the Council members has thrown their saber.  Still in motion, Pong Krell twists to deflect it.  It scores a long ricochet gouge in the wall.  Krell’s huge bulk is still moving forward while he’s facing back, and Obi-Wan throws out a hand: a small, precise Force push, right to Krell’s poorly planted right foot.

It goes out from under him.  Krell begins to topple.  Ever opportunity’s devotee, Anakin sprints forward and slides into the space behind Krell.  Extinguishes his saber.  Points it straight up.

Like a brilliant flower, the blue blade blooms from Krell’s chest as he falls to the ground.

Thump.

Krell goes still.

The smell of cooked fish begins to permeate the room.

And Anakin ends up with several hundred pounds of limp Besalisk directly on top of him, which he’s not exactly thrilled about.  He probably should have thought this through.  With his flesh left hand, since his right is still holding the lightsaber and trapped between his body and Krell’s, he starts to shove at the dead weight before realizing with a jolt of pure adrenaline that his sunglasses are missing.  Kriff, kriff!  He fumbles in a panic around his head with his free hand, accidentally flicking the glasses a few inches further away before managing to grab them and shove them onto his face, which is luckily turned to the side and hidden from onlookers by Krell’s upper left arm.

He gets them back on just in time, as hands grip Krell’s visible wrist and haul the corpse bodily off of Anakin.  It’s a relief when his cheekbone is no longer squished uncomfortably beneath Krell’s massive shoulder blade.  Anakin’s saber is still on, and the smell of cooked fish gets worse before he manages to flick the extinguisher button.  Gratefully, he pushes himself out the rest of the way and stumbles to his feet, brushing off his robes.  Ugh, he thinks Krell might’ve stopped showering near the end there.  His robes will need to be washed.  Repeatedly.

“Knight Skywalker.  All right, you are?” Yoda asks, hobbling up toward Anakin’s left leg.

“Me?  Oh, yeah, I’m fine.  He’s toast though, right?”  Anakin still feels a bit dazed.  A four hundred pound Sith falling on you will do that to a person, even if that person realistically should have expected it.

“Pong Krell is dead, yes,” Shaak Ti answers from where she’s crouched over the body, examining Krell’s sightless eyes.

Master Windu’s head nods solemnly.  “Obi-Wan, Saesee, we need to see all of his communications for the past…year.  No, better make it the whole war.  We have no idea what he could have leaked.”  He pauses.  “Skywalker, report to the Halls of Healing if you need to.  Your quarters if you don’t.  And don’t mention a word of this to anyone.  Is that clear?”

“As kyber,” Anakin replies, resisting the urge to snap off a salute.  He bows to the assembled masters and starts fast-walking for the door.  Did he really get away with it?  His heart is still hammering like he’s on an infiltration mission, the high of victory mixed with a potent animal fear.  He nearly jumps out of his skin when Ki-Adi-Mundi, engrossed in a datapad near the door, absently touches his arm to get his attention on his way out.

“Oh, that’s a shame,” the old master says kindly, looking far too closely at Anakin’s face.

“What is?” Anakin manages.  His voice sounds too high to his own ears.

Master Mundi reaches up and taps his fingernail twice on the rim of Anakin’s saving grace.  “You’ve got a crack in your new glasses.”

/B/

Obi-Wan messages his comm that evening.  Says he wants to talk.  Anakin leaves off looming and making probably unhelpful suggestions over Ahsoka’s literature homework, and heads downstairs to his erstwhile master’s quarters.  He expects tea, or something.  Obi-Wan probably wants answers.  The apartment should be safe for that, Anakin soundproofed and bug-proofed it back when he was a (more) paranoid little preteen.

The door slides open to Obi-Wan looking…not stellar.  This whole thing is probably a mess for the Council, though rather less of one than it would have been if he hadn’t already done the heavy lifting himself.  Obi-Wan is frozen mid-pace, watching Anakin with inscrutable eyes and a burbling, uncomfortably agitated presence in the Force.

As soon as the door slides shut again, he speaks.  “Was Krell telling the truth?  Did you really use the Force to…unbalance him like that?”  Obi-Wan sounds queasy.

Anakin doesn’t get it.  “Well, yeah,” he says slowly, warily.  “But I didn’t make him a Sith, he was a Sith before that.  That was the whole problem.”

“You—what, you exerted…pressure on his Force presence?”

“…Yeah, essentially.  Oh, and I projected my own nightmares at him.  Deprived him of sleep.  A real Jedi would just release it to the Force, but Sith are driven by passion, they’re inherently unbalanced; I figured he had to crack eventually, and flash his eyes where somebody could see.  I just had to make sure that happened in the presence of someone who could handle him—i.e., the Council.”  Honestly, it was way less reckless than most of Anakin’s plans.  He smiles uneasily.

Something complicated is happening within Obi-Wan in the Force, something he’s unable to put his finger on before Obi-Wan’s end of the bond abruptly shuts down.

A pause.

“How…how could you possibly think I would approve of this?” Obi-Wan says slowly, voice hushed with horror.

Anakin is living proof that if you act disappointed in someone for absolutely everything, on occasion up to and including breathing, for the better part of their childhood, eventually your disappointment loses its power as a deterrent.  It still hurts like hell, yes, draws up a bucket from the well of shame residing deep in the pit of your stomach, splashes its acid all over your fragile organs.  But when one realizes something is unavoidable, one stops trying so hard to avoid it.  Nowadays, Anakin just gets angry.

He unclenches his jaw with effort.  “I just don’t understand what you’re objecting to.  I’ve been watching you play mind games for twelve years, I was just using what you taught me.”  (I thought you’d be proud.)

“What I—?!  What you just did, and what I do, are very, very different, Padawan!”

“How.  Tell me how.  How are they different.”

“You drove a man out of his mind, Anakin!”

Too loud, that was too loud.  But Anakin can’t restrain himself from responding in kind.  “He was a Sith, he was already out of his mind!”

“That does not make what you did to him acceptable!”

There’s a terror vibrating in Obi-Wan’s voice, he registers dimly.  Obi-Wan never raises his voice.  “What about it was unacceptable?!”

“You know damn well what about it was—”

“No, I don’t!”

“Yes, you do!”

“I swear to you—”

“It was Dark, you—!   It was Dark! ” Obi-Wan roars, his explosion ringing off every wall of the apartment.

…

As if by lightning, Anakin is struck dumb.

Kriff, wait, he’s right.

…

…But, the thought crystallizes in Anakin’s mind, resonating like kyber with the memory of his lunch with Barriss, that doesn’t mean I was wrong .

“What would you have had me do instead, then?” Anakin says slowly, more quietly.  When your opponent is unbalanced, that’s when you rebalance yourself.  “Tell me that.  What could I have done for a better outcome?”

“You could have told the Council!”

Oh, that is the most—“I did tell the Council!  I told you!”

“You should have let me handle it then!”

“And you were really going to deal with it in the next—what, the next 12 hours?  Krell was shipping out with his battalion tomorrow , Obi-Wan!  He’s been killing his own men!  For years!”  Obi-Wan tries to say something, but Anakin barrels over him.  “And the Council didn't notice, and the Council didn’t do anything, and the Council was going to continue to do nothing and let innocent men die!   I did what needed to be done, General Kenobi.”  He spits Obi-Wan’s title with a sarcastic edge.  “Maybe what I do is Dark, but you’ve been damn grateful for it on the battlefield a hundred times, and you’re going to keep being damn grateful for it ‘cause it’s not going to stop.  I’m going to do what needs to be done to protect you, and Ahsoka, and as many of my men as possible, and kriff whatever the Council has to say about that.”

Anakin is breathing hard by the end, practically snorting the wrath superheating his lungs.  Obi-Wan, however, has managed a 180 while Anakin wasn’t looking.  He has an icy look on his face, perfectly composed, and it only makes Anakin want to strangle him more.

“Are you quite done,” Obi-Wan says quietly, crossing his arms.

In spite of everything, it still sends a frisson of fear skittering down his brainstem, to see Obi-Wan looking at him like a stranger.

“You took vows, Anakin,” Obi-Wan begins, cold fury percolating beneath his flat tone.  “You vowed to revere and protect life in all its forms.  You vowed loyalty to the Jedi High Council.  You vowed to uphold the laws of the Republic, including those regarding due process of the law.  And you renewed those vows upon your knighting, just two years ago.

“I raised you as a Jedi.  I raised you in an ancient tradition devoted to protecting and serving the galaxy, and I was proud of the knight you’d become.”

Obi-Wan’s voice is very, very quiet as he pronounces his next words.  One by one, they fall heavily into place on Anakin’s soul.

“I have never been so disappointed in you as I am now.”

It’s like a punch to the gut.  He feels nauseous, detached from himself.  Okay, maybe Obi-Wan’s disappointment does still have the power to eviscerate him.

(Emotion makes Anakin impulsive.  It always has.)

(In three, two, one…)

“Then it’s a good thing I’m leaving,” Anakin whispers harshly.

A dead pause.

The coldness in Obi-Wan’s eyes cracks and shudders.  He blinks.  “What?”

“As soon as the war ends.  As soon as my men are safe, and Ahsoka’s knighthood is guaranteed.  I’m leaving the Order.”  He clears his throat; Obi-Wan is still frozen in incomprehension.  “My actions won’t be your responsibility, anymore.”

“Wait,” says Obi-Wan.  “Wait.”

“I’ll see you on campaign, Obi-Wan,” Anakin says numbly, and turns and walks away.

Huh.  The last word, at last.

It really doesn’t feel great.

/B/

Ahsoka is waiting in their shared quarters to give him an emphatic, breath-banishing hug as soon as he enters.  He rubs her montrals and feels guilty for being glad he forgot to shut down their bond during the previous conversation.  Then she tries to make dinner and burns it, and he has to fix it with massive amounts of salt and spice.  Which is admittedly an okay distraction.

That evening, when she repeats her offer to spot-check him though joint meditation, he gives in.

“Well, good news!  It’s not that much different than usual, Skyguy,” Ahsoka chirps when they both resurface, after stretching her arms above her head with a dramatic yawn that shows off her sharp canines.

“Really?  I’m all good?”

“You’re all good.”

She’s not meeting his eyes.  He narrows his eyes and waits.

“Well, sort of.”  She squirms under his gaze.  His dread grows stronger.  “I mean.  It is kind of dark in there, Master,” she finally admits in a small voice.

At the words, his heart sinks a little deeper into that well of shame, but not as deep as he expected.  He knew this was coming.  If he’s honest with himself, he knew it all along.

“But it’s not necessarily what you think it is!” Ahsoka rushes to interrupt his thoughts, all wide-eyed intensity.  “I mean.  To be totally honest, it’s been a little dark in there as long as I’ve known you.”

“What?  Really?”  He isn’t an idiot, it’s not that surprising, but she could sense that?  And she still…

“Yeah.  Just a little!  But not—not bad dark, if you know what I mean?”  She fidgets, rearranging her legs out of a full lotus and into a more comfortable cross-legged seat.  “I, uh.  I didn’t really know what to make of it, when we first made the bond, but you’ve—I mean, you’ve always been there for me, Master.  Even when it got dark.  Sometimes especially then.  So it doesn’t scare me anymore, it—at this point, it kind of makes me feel safe.”

Snips is leaning forward, resting her elbows on her knees, all earnestness.  Kriff, he’s actually gonna cry, he realizes with alarm.  What did he do to deserve this kid?

Of course, Jedi aren’t built for emotional honesty, so as soon as she hears herself Ahsoka sits back up and coughs into her hand.  “I mean, maybe that makes me a bad Jedi,” she laughs off awkwardly.  “But I dunno.  All I’m saying is, I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t be able to trust you now, if I trusted you then and you’ve saved my life like eighty times since then.  And it…I dunno, it kind of suits you, Master.  I don’t know if you’d be you without it.”

It suits you… that’s what Padme said about his eyes.  Two of the smartest people he knows, and both of them are telling him…he needs to think about this.

But first: “You should watch out, Snips, my ego is inflating as we speak.”  Coward that he is, he brings it back to banter, smiling weakly.  “When did you get so wise, little one?”

“Probably when I started hanging out with Rex,” she fires back cheekily, as they both rise to their feet.

“You might be right.  Hey, since we ship out soon, wanna go grab some iced t’jabi liver from that place near the barracks?”

“Like I would ever say no to that!” she enthuses, all gravity forgotten, already rushing to pull on her discarded over-robe to guard against the chilly Coruscant evening.

He tugs on her padawan beads as she passes and laughs when she growls at him, still feeling a little distant from himself.  “Yeah, I know you wouldn’t.  You’ve got expensive tastes, Snips.”

“Of course not!  I would never place value in material things,” she says snootily, drawing her outer robe around her with exaggerated gravity.  “Luminous beings we are, haven’t you heard?”  She grins—“That’s why you’re paying, Darth Dorkious.”

He almost chokes on his own spit, trying not to laugh.  “Too soon, Snips!”

She’s still laughing at him when they leave the room.  He still feels—he doesn’t know, exactly from the conversation with Obi-Wan, but.  But.  In this moment, he almost doesn’t notice it, blinded by his padawan’s light.

/B/

Life goes on.  Anakin spends his days with Ahsoka, Rex, and the 501st, spends his nights with Padme, grabs one politely friendly lunch in the refectory with Aayla Secura, and avoids Obi-Wan for the last three days of his leave.  With one day left before he ships back out, he meets up with Barriss again at Dex’s.

Ahsoka wanted to be there, but she had finals for her classes every day this week, her teachers desperately cramming in early evaluations before she leaves on campaign.  There was no other time to do this.  And Anakin has two tasks to complete.  He has a confession to make, and some unfinished business to finish.

They make small talk and war talk until his porg sandwich and her salad are finished and pushed to the side, and then he gets down to business.  “I’ve been thinking.”

“Yes?”  It sounds slightly sardonic, but when he looks up, she’s blinking innocently at him.  She clearly spends too much time with Ahsoka.  He scowls so she knows he’s onto her before continuing.

This isn’t a battle, he’s made peace with this.  He has Padme’s blessing, Ahsoka’s blessing.  This isn’t such a difficult thing.  “I’m thinking, it’s.  It’s time to stop lying to myself.  What we—what I did to Krell was definitely Dark.  But no one got hurt except Krell, and we were able to save a lot of lives; soldiers died by the thousands on his campaigns, besides whatever he would have done with his Temple access when he got tired of hiding.”

Barriss nods.  “So?”

“So I think you might be right.  Can the Dark Side really be wholly evil, if it can be used to enforce justice and protect people?”

She hmms, acknowledging his point, and has the grace not to be smug about it.  “So the dichotomy between Light and Darkness, it’s not good and evil.  And it’s not emotion and calm, necessarily, the paradoxes in the Jedi Code account for that.  The Light is about order.  Order and…order and chaos?”

Back on Tatooine, the bright heat of the day threw everything into focus, pressed everything down into weary routine like a flower dried under glass. The day was long; it taught and demanded resilience.  The night was no kinder, really—the knock at the door could just as easily be the savior with her scanner or the slaughterer with his knife—but the darkness was always pregnant with opportunity, lit intermittently by the fireworks the slaves called deliverance.  Some people, Obi-Wan’s people, will slog their way blindly through the shifting sands of a hundred nights just to feel the sun on their face one more day.  But Anakin, he thinks he’s one of those people who would trade a thousand days to spend one heady predawn hour all alone in the center of the Dune Sea; or, all else failing, to go out like a firework in the heat of the night.

“Order and freedom,” Anakin says thoughtfully.

Barriss takes a moment to think about that.  “Freedom…yes, that makes sense.  That could be where the Sith went wrong, fundamentally.  The tyrannical tendencies, the urge to empire….They seek freedom for the few through the enslavement of the many.  The Jedi seek to ensure the well-being of the many through the exacting restriction of the few, and the less stringent regulation of the rest.”

It can’t be so simple, though, there are so many ways to define both “order” and “freedom.”  The Jedi preach that true freedom is accomplished through complete self-control, and while that logic doesn’t quite resonate with Anakin, he can understand it.  “Is it possible to ensure the freedom of the many without compromising your own?”

“I think you do have to compromise your own.  A little bit,” Barriss reflects.  “I do think the Code is wise to suggest that freedom can be achieved through self-control, or at least self-control doesn’t inhibit freedom.  Self-control is, by its very nature, an expression of freedom.”

“Hmm.”  She’s Temple-raised, of course she totally buys into that.  It strikes him that this is a perfect segue though.  “If that’s true, then there’s something you need to do.”

She blinks, and the set of her jaw regains a tinge of its old wariness.  “I—what?”

Anakin makes sure he has eye contact, retains it.  Obi-Wan taught him that: he used to hate eye contact, but now he knows it’s a tool, and he uses it.  “Leave the Order, Barriss,” he says as gently as he can.

“I.”  She blinks again, her hand drifting up to her opposite arm.  “Leave the Order?  I couldn’t.”

“My—I have a friend who can help you.  Senator Amidala of Naboo, she’s involved with a lot of refugee resettlement programs, and while the Order should provide you with the funds to get started, they have a lot of great resources for people starting new lives, in cultural contexts that feel alien to them.  You won’t even be hopping planets—with the right testimonials, you can get a nice apartment blocks from the Temple entrance a few levels down.  See Ahsoka and all your friends whenever they’re in town, go for dinner with Master Luminara every week once the war’s over.  You don’t have to give up everything.  But the way things are, you have to know you’re at risk of losing everything.  You saw what happened to Krell.”

Her nostrils flare.  “I could say the same to you.”

“And I’d say yeah, actually, I’m planning on it.  As soon as the war ends.”  He hesitates, but he’s already divulged some of his darkest secrets to this kid.  “I promised someone.”

Her petite features aren’t quite as suited as Ahsoka’s to the mulish cast her face takes on.  “Well then I’ll leave after the war, too.  You’re delaying because you don’t want to abandon your men, right?  I can’t abandon mine either.”

Anakin sighs, resists the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose with his metal hand.  He can’t afford to even risk breaking the glasses.  “There’s a difference between our situations, and that is that you are a kid.   I’m an adult and a general, and if I quit, my padawan and my troops would get passed on to who knows what pompous jerk.  But you’re a teenager, and a commander.  Don’t you trust Master Luminara and your captains to take care of their battalion?”

“But I’m a healer.  How many lives won’t be saved if I leave?”

Anakin feels the tension in the moment.  Takes a breath, exhales.  This is the tipping point.  He was raised by a diplomat and married a politician.  He can say this in a way that will get through to her.

“You took the same classes as me.  You know as well as I do that there’s two forms of self-control.  There’s the type where you push through, and persevere despite the odds, and there’s the type where you remove yourself from the equation.  Where you know, beyond a doubt, that you can’t handle a situation, so you avoid being put in that situation in the first place.”  He leans forward, metal making a quiet thunk through the glove as he rests his interlocked hands on the table.  “Barriss, you know you aren’t suited for this war.  If you keep pushing yourself without anything to ground you, you’re going to reach a point where you’re unable to help anyone.  Including yourself.”

It’s true.  Being a medic is hard, even when you don’t personally know and love all the men you’re losing, and Barriss has already Fallen this far.  She had one hand still gripping the edge of the cliff when she revealed herself to him, dangling bloody-nailed out over the void, and he gave her something else to hold onto, but it’s not enough.  She’s still dangling.  She needs time, and space, and more hands than he has left to offer to crawl back up to solid ground.

“On the other hand…” he hazards, because he’s still got her full, wide-eyed attention.  Distantly, he registers that he’s slipped into the tone he uses when Ahsoka is concussed or otherwise distressed.  “If you leave now, you can keep studying the use of the Dark Side for healing.  You’re one of Master Nu’s favorite padawans”—a complete guess, but she doesn’t dispute it—“and you’ve already seen half of what’s down there, anyway.  The Order doesn’t hold a grudge against those who leave on good terms, I bet she’ll still let you have access to the library even if you’re, technically, a civilian researcher.  As long as you don’t give them reason to suspect,” he emphasizes with a significant look.  “And even if you lose your access, there’s a whole universe of undiscovered Sith artifacts out there!”  Admittedly, he probably shouldn’t be encouraging a teenager to explore Sith temples alone, but that’s genuinely probably safer than her staying.  He’ll leave it to Padme to undo that particular damage.  “Without the war to distract you, imagine how much freer to travel and study you’ll be.  And if you really do figure out some sort of advanced Darksider healing technique?  I for one would take you on as a civilian medic with the 501st in an instant.  Luminara would almost certainly do the same, if you could keep hiding it.  At the rate this war is going?  In the long term, I bet you could save more lives by leaving than by staying.”

Padme helped him craft this particular pitch, but he thinks Obi-Wan would still be proud of his delivery.  (If Obi-Wan were still capable of being proud of him.)  Now to see if it sank in.

Barriss is looking a little shell-shocked, honestly, but she recovers her composure quickly, as always.  Looks him in the eye.  “Thank you for your advice, Master Skywalker.  I think I need some time to…think about this.”

He shrugs, spreads his hands on the table to help him lever himself to his feet.  “Take the time you need.  I’ll support you, whatever you choose, and I know Ahsoka will too.”  He smiles. “Secret Sith solidarity, eh?”

“Oh that’s horrible,” Barriss says on reflex, but she’s smiling too now, standing to follow him out of the booth.  He’s never seen her smile much, even around Ahsoka.  Too serious, this one.  “But yes.  You and Ahsoka can count on me to.  Um.  ‘Back your plays.’”  It comes out incredibly awkward, amplified by how her hand drifts up to nervously tug on the draping part of her headscarf.

Anakin does not guffaw, because he has some tact, at least.  But he does grin widely, extending his left hand for a firm handshake.  For a moment, again, the grief of his rift with Obi-Wan retreats into the background, dimmed by the brilliance of this new victory.

“Welcome to the team, Padawan Offee!”

/B/

The First Two Tenets of the Aurelian Reform Sith Code, c. 20 BBY

(translated from the Huttese)

1. Don’t waste your water.
1. But there is a time for rain.

Chapter Text

Two days after Anakin, Ahsoka, and the Open Circle Fleet ship out for the Outer Rim, unbeknownst to Anakin, his worst nightmare comes true.

Well, not his worst nightmare.  That’s probably something about his wife dying, everyone who’s important to him dying, and the whole Republic falling because of him.  The works.  This isn’t quite on that level.  What happens is this: It turns out that a paparazzo managed to get some pictures of him, halfway to his second meeting at Dex’s with Barriss.  Accordingly, three standard cycles later, one of Coruscant’s trashiest gossip rags publishes an unconscionably lengthy article, interspersed with blurry, distant holoimages from various awkward angles, speculating on the Hero With No Fear’s bold new fashion choice.

It goes viral.

Suddenly, on every Core world and some of the Mid Rim as well, sentients are taking grinning selfies in all-black outfits and makeshift wrap-around sun goggles.  The arbiters of fast fashion catch onto this almost instantly, and soon the markets are flooded with cheap—and some expensive!—variations on some little backwater planet’s traditional eyewear.  The trend balloons.  The original clickbait article spawns a hundred, then ten thousand imitators in a plethora of tongues, all parading forth badly edited copies of the original pictures (copyright blithely ignored).  Within a Corellian tenday, you can’t walk down the street of a major galactic metropolis without seeing at least eight pairs of wrap-around sunglasses, modified for various species physiognomies.

It’s not entirely clear whether this is ironic or not, especially among the younger fans.  A number of Twixter accounts pop up personifying Anakin’s sunglasses themselves, as well as a few personifying Anakin’s (suffering) dignity.  But statistically, a good number of the later adopters have to be, painfully, in earnest.

Luckily, Anakin doesn't learn of this until much later, because Anakin has a war to fight.  Some of the 501st do learn about it, even though they have a war to fight.  They don't inform the General because it’s funnier not to, but they do begin to discreetly buy up the cheapest of these new crimes against fashion over the Holonet.  In bulk.

A thousand years from now, confused historians will record it as one of the strangest pieces of wartime propaganda the Republic has ever known.

/B/

“What’s your take, Rex?”  Anakin crosses his arms and widens his stance to level a more effective baleful glare at the holomap.

Rex smiles.  “He could be malfunctioning.”

“Ha.  We can hope.”

The huge holomap that dominates the strategy room of the Resolute is currently zoomed in on an unassuming sector, where they’ve gotten word of Grievous’ flagship and an unknown portion of his fleet lurking after a successfully repulsed siege near Ryloth.  (Mace Windu is quickly becoming the Order’s best at defensive siege tactics.  Anakin prefers the offensive side of that particular situation.  Lanteeb was…well.)  Their best information has Grievous in orbit over Arami, seemingly making preparations to land.  Unfortunately, their best information is based on long-distance signal interceptions that had to be triangulated taking into account the gravity well of two nearby stars.  He’s certainly in the system, or at least he was 16 hours ago, but precise location is a total unknown.

“The only real objective I can think of is to set a trap, General,” Rex settles, reaching up to zoom the map out.  “There's just nothing in this sector.  No high-value targets—Arami isn't even inhabited, and Gamorr is Gamorr.  Sure, our factories on Rothana are more or less close”—Rothana being the all-important seat of Republic military engineering—“if you consider 16 parsecs close.”

“And Rothanan security has made that entire zone pretty much impassable, anyway,” Anakin finishes the thought.  He reaches up to rotate the hologram and fails twice to produce any effect.  Irritated, he tugs off the glove on his flesh hand and succeeds in moving the stars up and back, exposing the underside of the galaxy.  “Arami has some natural reserves of Man’Telani acid, which used to be used in hyperdrives, but that’s obsolete technology now.  I could see some sort of attempt to establish inroads into the Core here, by ducking through Hutt space where it’s thinnest underneath the disk.  But he doesn't have the forces to do anything with that route at present, and there are better ways anyway.  So I agree, a trap is the most likely option.”  He frowns.  “We must be missing something.”

“Because the Seps’ve been so squeamish about sneaking around in the past?”

Anakin snorts.  “Because they're usually better at it.”

“What’s General Kenobi saying?”

Anakin’s scowl deepens.  “Not much.”  Rex feigns a look of exaggerated surprise, and Anakin chuckles a little despite himself.  “He thinks maybe they're going for Syrvis instead of Arami, it's got some mineral resources that Grievous could use.  But really not enough to justify a personal visit.”

Ahsoka chooses this moment to burst into the strategy room, looking slightly disheveled with her beads falling forward over one montral.  “I’m here!  Sorry.  What did I miss?”

“Nothing, Commander, we’re pretty much just going in circles here,” Rex reassures her while Anakin tugs the beads back into place.

She whacks at his hand in mock offense.  “What’s Obi-Wan's take?”

Anakin isn't sure what his face does in response, but Rex looks between them awkwardly.  “Ah.  I should really be debriefing the nav team now, actually.  General.  Commander.”  He nods to each of them in turn and hoofs it out of there.

Ahsoka waits about two seconds in deference to his discomfort before the interrogation begins.  “Okay, what’s up with you and Obi-Wan, is this why he’s bunking on the Negotiator instead of with us?  Are you still fighting?”   She has the nerve to look exasperated, which is completely unfair.  He'd like to see her deal with the man for eleven whole years; she’s barely even been alive that long.

“I let him in on what happened with our mutual fishy friend,” Anakin says shortly.  “He disapproves.”

Ahsoka looks more confused than sympathetic.  “What, Dex?”

What?   Oh.   “Not—I was being sarcastic.”

“...Master Fisto?”

“Ahsoka.”  He levels her with a meaningful look, flicks his eyes to the nearest security camera.

“Then—oohhhh.”  Ahsoka’s face clears to understanding, then a touch of embarrassment.  “Well, what’s he disapprove of?  We saved a lot of lives with that.”

“That’s what I said too.  He doesn't like the method.”

“What, because it’s—”  Two fingers draw the frame of a pair of sunglasses under her eyes.

“Basically.”  Something needles at the back of his mind; that wasn't all, and he knows it.  He shoves it back under.  “I talked to our other mutual friend, by the way.  Sh—they agreed to think about finding a new home nearby.  They’ve got the same idea as us about the, ah.  Underlying principles of their research.”

Ahsoka grins.  “Figures.  You know, I am a teenager.  If all my friends are buying sunglasses, maybe I should be doing it too….”

Anakin’s heart skips a beat.  “Don't even think about it.”  She laughs—she doesn't get it.  He puts his hands on her shoulders, forces her to meet his eyes.  “No, seriously.  I mean it, Ahsoka, this is dangerous.  You are not messing with it.”

Ahsoka rolls her eyes and brushes off his flesh hand.  “Yeah, no shit, Skyguy.”  When he doesn't move, she huffs and meets his eyes again, all sincerity.  “I’m joking.  Promise.”

Anakin’s heart rate begins to settle.  “Okay.  Okay.”  He drops his other hand, turns back with effort to the holomap.  “Alright, what’s your opinion on Grievous’ objective here?  Why Syrvis or Arami?”

She considers it for a long moment, rotating the map this way and that.  Her brow furrows.  Finally, she hazards, “...It’s a trap?”

“That's our best guess too.”

She grins, proud of this assessment.  “Good thing we know what to do with those.”

Anakin smiles back fiercely, a familiar battle rhythm beginning to pound on the edges of his consciousness.  “We do indeed.”

/B/

They emerge from hyperspace and conceal the fleet behind the asteroid belt above Arami before Anakin sends a squad of 501st stealth pilots for recon.  The results come in a few hours later.  No, Grievous has not hared off for Syrvis, as Obi-Wan expected.  His capital ships are arrayed above Arami: seven in all, outnumbering the current Open Circle Fleet by two.  (That would have been nice to know in advance, Anakin reflects darkly.)  And, more ominously, two of those huge vessels are reported to look…odd.

The holoimage in front of Anakin now is frustratingly grainy, so he can't see much beyond the broader shape of the ships in question.  Unlike the typical wedge-shaped destroyer, both ships have an odd voluminous teardrop shape more appropriate to a lander, with a huge, clumsy rounded front narrowing to a more typical, flattened stern behind.  He would almost be inclined to think the rounded end was the back, except that in the holoimage only one of these monstrosities is in profile and the other, the closer one, is facing away, allowing him to see the huge engines mounted on the fairly traditional snub end of the rear.  He can't see enough details to be sure, but he'd say there's something almost thrown-together about these ships, as if someone took an outdated destroyer and hastily welded this completely illogical, clumsy bludgeoning instrument onto the front of it.  They’d be fine in hyperspace, but he doubts they could achieve any sort of speed in a realspace race, with their poor maneuverability and the certainty of their catching every piece of space debris in the area on those huge noses.

Maybe that’s the point, and they’re meant to clear a path through some sort of debris field?  But there's nothing like that nearby, and they would only slow down Grievous’ fleet and ensure its destruction in any forward charge involving real opposition.

Anakin hears a low whine of servos and looks down to realize he’s clenching his metal hand hard enough to strain it.  With effort, he spreads his fingers.  Whatever purpose these ships were built for won’t matter if he can turn them into scrap metal before Grievous can use them.

Ahsoka pushes into the strategy room with a grim focus in the set of her jaw—on time now, when it matters—and a moment later the holographic images of Obi-Wan, Cody, Yularen, and a few other major navy officers appear around the round standing conference table, with the regional map displayed in the center once again.  The room is dimmed to make holomap viewing easier.  Anakin shares his pilots’ findings quickly and efficiently: seven capital ships in a reinforced wedge formation above the planet (with the two odd ones occupying the protected inner position), and approximately thirty smaller craft along with a few vulture droids swarming in the area between capital ships and surface.  Around half of these small ships seem to be landers, the other half gunships.  Due to the spread of their swarm, his recon team wasn't able to get any images of the planet’s surface, but it seemed likely from the activity of the landers and the density of comm chatter readings that a significant portion of Grievous’ forces were landside now.

This gives them some options.  Grievous doesn't actually have the numbers to blockade the planet, just enough to make it hard to land anywhere near his own ground troops.  They could potentially enter atmosphere just outside the Seps’ surveillance range (behind the curve of the planet, realistically) and send a slew of bombers in larties around to strafe Grievous’ ground forces without ever entering combat on foot—as long as the fleet could engage Grievous in space at the same time to prevent the atmosphere LAATs’ being sandwiched and cut down by heavy artillery.  (Grievous has been known to consider hitting his own droids below with a plasma cannon an acceptable loss.)  It’s a decent plan, and makes some use of Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Yularen’s respective strengths.  They could also take the more cautious route of putting boots on the ground and assessing Grievous’ ground forces from there before committing to an actual attack.  This is Obi-Wan’s inclination, landlubber that he is.  And then there’s the most aggressive route: Theoretically, with the way Grievous’ capital ships are concentrated with all his forces beneath them, they could launch a narrow and devastating attack from above the capital formation, attempting to push one or more capital ships into the planet's gravitational field and, hopefully, crush some proportion of his forces beneath them.  Once, and once only, Anakin succeeded in breaking a minor siege this way, and it was absolutely glorious.  But in this situation, with so many unknowns, he’s inclined to think it’s too risky.  He’s in favor of the in-atmosphere bomber run himself.

“If we land ground troops before bombing, we lose the element of surprise,” he reasons, eyeing Obi-Wan’s side of the table.

“Yes, but if we’re all in agreement that it’s a trap, the element of surprise is minimal anyways,” Obi-Wan clips out, narrowing his holographic eyes.

“That’s exactly why we need to take fast and devastating action!” Anakin grits out. “If it is a trap, we need to break it, not walk slowly into it with our gundarks tethered.”

“With our…what?”  Yularen, who has been watching the back-and-forth with pursed lips, pinches the bridge of his nose.  “Gentlemen, this is unproductive.  We have other options, we can find a compromise.”

One of the newer high officers raises her hand, then looks a little embarrassed and lowers it to unmute herself.  “Is there any reason we can't land ground forces and use a half-strength bombing run as a recon opportunity?  That would also reserve more pilots for the space battle, in case of unexpected developments.”  They all glance distrustfully at the two strange ships on the holo.

Anakin shakes his head.  “I like the idea of using bombers as recon, but sending less than sixty pilots for the initial strafe could be suicide when we don't know what ground artillery they have.”

Yularen hums.  “Perhaps, but they outnumber us in space.  Can we afford to send sixty of our best pilots to the ground under these conditions?”

“Precisely,” Obi-Wan agrees.  “Whereas landing the 212th preserves our resources out of atmosphere and could resolve many of these unknowns.  Suicide would be potentially stranding our best bombers between two layers of the enemy while any potential reinforcements in space are overwhelmed.”

Obi-Wan is being particularly acidic today, and it's beginning to drive Anakin up the wall.  Despite his resolution to be totally professional, he’s having trouble wrestling down his temper.  “We don't actually know that they have overwhelming numbers in space.  We know that they took heavy aerial casualties in their last engagement, and we believe that a large proportion of their troops are on the ground,” he says, poking a finger into the table.  “And those bludgeon-nosed ships likely don't contain full contingents of fighters.  It looks like the hammer thing they’ve stuck on the front is covering a lot of their hangar exits.”

“Do we know that?” Obi-Wan’s hologram says with a sigh.

Of all the insulting—!  “We'll take that into consideration, General,” Yularen interjects smoothly.  “My proposal is this: We open with a feint.  Three of our capital ships pretend they’re trying to open a long-term space battle by grounding one of their capital ships, in order to draw out their forces and thereby assess their numbers both in space and on the ground.  If those numbers are manageable, we follow through on preparations to land the 212th and all of its pilots, reinforcing them with 20 pilots of the 501st for a two-phase bombing run.  If not, we focus all of our resources on a space battle, since Arami is uninhabited.  Is this an acceptable compromise?”

Well, it's not terrible.  Simple but open to more complex adjustments, prudent but not overly cautious.   Anakin would like to get a closer look at those hammer-headed ships before committing too many pilots in atmosphere, and it somewhat preserves the land bombers’ element of surprise.  “It’s good.  I approve,” he says after a moment of consideration, the burning in his chest subsiding.

“General Kenobi?”

Obi-Wan hesitates longer, looking inscrutable; since this plan reveals their presence before landing, it could potentially expose his ground troops to more aggression on the way down.  If he exercises his veto power now Anakin may punch something.  But he just strokes his beard for a moment before lowering his hand to the table.  “I approve.”

/B/

Anakin holds down both triggers until the enemy explodes in front of him, and buzzes through the wreckage, grinning at the slight impacts on his hull.  Around him, his men and the other fighters of the Open Circle Fleet wheel and circle in dizzying patterns, vortices of action and emotion.  Lights wink out, in the back of his mind, but the centrifugal forces pull more strongly on his attention as he banks around another fighter and takes out his tail just in time to pull up over the wing of one of Grievous’ capital ships.

So far, the space battle is going surprisingly well.  Their feint managed to do some real damage to the right backmost capital ship and one of the blunt-nosed ships, while the advantageous positioning of their own destroyers—all in profile or nose-on—has saved them from taking too many hits.  Honestly, it seems like their estimates of the enemy’s numbers were actually way over.  Anakin is almost certain it can be attributed to the blunt-nosed ships, but he hasn't yet had time to verify.  It’s both great and extremely suspicious.

Around him, stars blur against velvety black as he takes his fighter into a roll over the vast gray surface of a capital ship, evading fire.

Their goal, at this stage, is to draw as many of Grievous’ small fighting craft as possible up above the capital wedge, so that they’re no longer concentrated between it and the planet.  Not only does this make it easier to estimate numbers and interrupt whatever operation Grievous is landing for, but also, establishing the theater up here from the start will be a boon if they do decide to land forces accompanied by an in-atmosphere bombing run.  So far, the small-craft battlefield has broken into five swarms (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say giant dogfight zones): two primary swarms close together at the back of the capital wedge, between the two destroyers forming the wedge's broad tail; two secondary swarms centering over the two middle destroyers in the wedge and the odd, rounded ships tucked in between them; and one smaller, tertiary swarm over the lead ship in the wedge.  These swarms tend to be mobile, within a certain range.  Drawing them apart or collapsing them together is half of strategy at this level of a space battle.

He buzzes in close past another vulture droid and nails it with his rear cannon when it swerves automatically in his wake, not even looking as it explodes behind him, because there’s less than no time to think.  There’s no memory, only the present and the very immediate future overlapping each other on separate axes, as he throws himself into a left-hand roll this time to dodge a wedge of vultures and comes out of it perfectly positioned to fill the empty space in Gold Squadron’s gathering nine-fighter egg-and-blade.  “Good of you to join us, General!” Bammer cracks over the comms, and Anakin laughs a little giddily, before the enemy finishes closing this unwise pocket in its secondary left-wing defensive swarm.  Gold’s whole formation tilts 90 degrees in unison and transitions into a rolling egg, laying down the omnidirectional strafing fire all egg formations are known for.  Starbursts all around them.  Then Anakin barks, “Break three!” and the formation dissolves as quickly as it came into three tailed wedges, already moving because most of these men are seasoned enough pilots to recognize the three best windows they’ve created without him telling them, and the rookies just follow whoever’s most purposeful-looking.  Two of them take their newly created corridor to the engines of the second-from-leftmost capital ship (judging “left” by the noses of these enemy juggernauts).  Anakin’s group of three turns back toward the dead zone at the nose of the leftmost destroyer, so Anakin peels off above the capital wedge to join the reinforcements Green Squadron’s lieutenant has been screaming for for the last three and a half seconds.

But they beep the all-clear before he can even see the primary right-wing swarm through the primary left-wing swarm, which has drifted upwards, so he takes advantage of the momentary lull in the battle to turn and dive down into a crack in the dense middle of the capital wedge, near the nose of one of the odd hammerhead ships, determined to finally get a look at one of these aberrations from the side.

The narrow (comparatively narrow; it’s probably about an eighth of a mile) space between two destroyers in formation both is and isn't one of the safest places to be in a space battle—the destroyers won't fire for fear of hitting each other, but vultures love to chase you down into the restrictive area.  They especially love to push you out below the destroyers, since beneath a dense, horizontally aligned capital formation in the act of landing troops is a very bad place to be.  Anakin acquires a tail almost immediately as he descends (for a given definition of descending; it is space).  In the absence of Artoo’s targeting assistance, he hits his rear guns without looking and is gratified to see an explosion behind him.  There’s no sound, of course, but the blood pumping in his arteries and the Force singing in his ears provide a lovely accompaniment.

Ducking in close to the left-hand side and absently performing a little wing-waggle that nearly crashes his overcompensating pursuers, Anakin realizes that his hodgepodge theory was right.  These are old ships, really old, and attaching the reinforced nose actually sealed off most of the hangar exits.  He zooms past panel after panel of gray metal and machinery and sleeping turrets, growing more and more excited as blank metal continues to extend where hangar exits should be.

He’s zipping full-speed toward the engine end of the blank-nosed ship now, but his remaining tail decides to risk opening fire, and he has to shift his focus to avoid it, juking and spinning tightly over his right wing.  Losing patience, he cuts his right engines and floors the left, executing an abrupt and extremely dangerous about-face while his momentum keeps him hurtling backwards.  The craft creaks and shudders and volubly threatens to tear itself apart—fighters were not designed to drift— but he grits his teeth until his jaws ache and holds it together with the Force.  Even before the two vultures come into view in front of him, he’s shooting, and they both explode into so much debris.  The ship keeps spinning around, finishes its wild mid-flight turn, and he guns his right engines again at just the right moment.  The ship holds together, the metal quiets.  His heart settles in his chest as he resists the urge to laugh out loud.  It’s a good thing Artoo isn’t with him for this battle—the little droid is a daredevil of the highest order, but even he would not have been happy about that particular maneuver.

Just in time, he glances back at his original objective and sees it, clear as day, as he hurtles past at reduced speed.

What?!

The one remaining hangar exit on this side, the only one not rendered unusable by the mysterious nose addition, is welded shut.  Not even nicely: The huge bubbly snail trail of metal extends all the way across the horizontal crack between the closed doors, messy and winding.

Then Anakin is shooting out past the destroyer’s engines and pulling up sharply into the dogfighting mess that is the left primary defensive swarm.  Almost instantly, he’s clipped twice from the right and all thought of strategic intel takes a backseat to the heady blaze of precognition and his personal most frequently employed Jedi mantra of fuck, fuck, sithspit, fuck, e chu ta, these motherfuckers—

His guys are being cut to pieces up here, numbers depleted, and he ends up dawdling among them for twenty minutes or so, getting them organized and shouting redistribution orders.  Finally, the situation stabilizes enough for him to wheel toward the swarm’s calmer exterior and key in a certain frequency.  “Admiral!” Anakin shouts into his comm, exulting in the moment.  “The weird ships don't carry small craft!”

The line crackles as Yularen presumably rushes to hit the button.  “None of them?”

“Only two hatches to let them out, and those are literally welded shut!”  He doesn't technically know that, hasn’t seen the other side or the other ship, but as he says it, he feels its truth.

“Stars and nebulas,” Yularen says faintly to himself.  And then: “Open the bays, get the 212th landing!  Yes, now, officer!  Connect me to—” and the connection is cut.

And then it’s back to spinning and juking and dodging and surviving by the skin of his teeth and the flickering of the stars.  Anakin is grinning like a madman, though he doesn't have the presence of mind to notice it.  The Force purrs all around him like a contented cat, or a million-cylinder engine.  It feels like moving faster than thought.  He ducks playfully across Diesel’s path to a loud “Hey!” over comms and shoots once—twice—thrice in the space of the universe’s long, slow blink.

This is where Anakin excels: absolutely dominating a space with nothing else in it but the enemy.  No husbanding scarce resources and brainstorming tricks and traps to eke out an advantage from preexisting features of the environment.  In space, you don't have to deal with those things; the playing field is entirely yours to create.  Anakin’s gift lies in magicking up formations to counter other formations, choosing the least expected angle out of infinite possible angles, creating something out of absolutely nothing, or at least nothing but what he brought in.  There’s no up or down in space; directions are all relative to something, so there are no directions except the arbitrary ones they assign based on capital ship orientations.  Absolutely no restrictions, from a certain perspective.  It’s chaos, constantly shifting faster than the mind can process, and rather than try to counter that, impose order onto it, he leans into the chaos by reacting to changes faster than the enemy.

On a few levels, there is order, of course.  There's an overall strategy, dictating what zone of the battlefield he wants his men in and what zone he wants the enemy in.  There’s also the set of tactical formations they assume on a dime in order to penetrate and pummel and defend.  But that type of order responds to and arises from the chaos of a space battle, without denying or negating it.  That order emerges from freedom, rather than restricting it.  It's not equilibrium, it's paradox, and it makes his blood hum with liquid epiphany, igniting the web of capillaries just beneath his skin.

/B/

Minutes or hours later—a bit less than two standard hours, his chronometer tells him—his comm beeps a formal transmission request.  He nearly takes a hit reaching for the button, but recovers by using the Force to jerk the throttle; the force of it presses him back in his seat.  “Skywalker here.”

“Are you in combat?  There’s been a development,” Obi-Wan’s Core accent clips out tersely.

And Anakin’s picked up another three-man tail.  He curses quietly.  “Hang on,” he says, and pulls into a dive that lets him come up behind them and blast them to bits.  There’s something beautiful about the moment a fighter explodes, trapped oxygen releasing in a white cloud like sea spray.  Anakin likes the sea.  “Almost ready.”

The Force abruptly screams a warning and Anakin hits the accelerator and pulls up on pure instinct, just in time to avoid being hit from behind by a suicide run.  A moment later, his own blinding, firecracker death screams through him in the Force, a disorienting instant of post-cognition.  He shakes his head to clear it, banks sharply right to dip around one last dogfight.  And then he’s soaring out of the thick of it and leaving the battle mostly behind him, making a beeline across open space until he’s finally able to take refuge under Yularen’s engines.  Another light winks out in his wake: one of Heavy’s friends.  Cupid.

“Alright, make it quick,” he snaps out.  Instantly, he winces at his tone, feels dread pool in his stomach and smother some adrenaline, but for once, Obi-Wan says nothing.  Nothing except:

“There’s a Shadow on-planet.”

“A Shadow?”  That’s the last thing Anakin expected.  “Why didn't the Council tell us?  And why are they here in the middle of nowhere?”

“I was surprised too.  It’s a knight and padawan; the knight says they were finishing up a classified operation on Rothana and sensed a Force-sensitive child in distress on their way back to Coruscant.  Since they weren't privy to the intel that Grievous was in the area, they didn't have any reason to inform the Council.”

“Are we sure…?”

“Her codes check out,” Obi-Wan replies grimly.  In the background, he hears the clanking of tanks and a choked-off scream.  “And her information seems good.”

“Information?”

“They hid in the mountains when Grievous showed up, and have had time to familiarize themselves with the topography and run surveillance from above.  Apparently there’s an artificial chemical lake from a failed terraforming project, if I can—well, that’s not important.  If the information is legitimate, I should be able to win the land battle within two standard hours.”

Anakin whistles.  “Kriff, there's no way we got this lucky.  What’s the catch?”

“I also have confirmed reports that Grievous is on-planet.”

Hope swells like a bubble rising to the surface of a Mon Cal ocean.   “But that's fantastic news!  We can actually pin him down, without risk of civilian casualties.  We can—or, shit, I guess we can't just bombard him if this Shadow is in range.”  He pauses, considers that.  “You don't think….”

“It’s certainly not his whole reason—we’ve destroyed three tankers full of that hyperdrive acid you noted as obsolete.  But if he knows they're here, they may be secondary targets.  The knight is a Shadow coming from Rothana; she certainly has information the Seps would value.”

“And Grievous has a thing about padawans,” Anakin finishes grimly.  “Do they have transportation?  Could they fly out of range of a full-strength bombardment by the time we could get in position to launch one?”

“They have a ship.”  Obi-Wan pauses.  “Is the space battle going that well?  Do you think we could push or lure their capital formation out of the way long enough for a planetary barrage?”

“Well, yeah, if we pushed.”  He chews his lip.

“That would mean heavy casualties, wouldn't it.”  Obi-Wan sounds accusing all of the sudden, and Anakin bristles.

“Yes, but it’s Grievous!”  Isn't Obi-Wan the one always pushing for considering the long term over the short term, strategy over getting too attached to individual lives?  It would kill Anakin to lose men unnecessarily, but this is war, and he knows Rex and his brothers will be right behind him if it means Grievous dies bad.

But the thought quells the bubbling in his blood.  The 501st, despite its famed aggression, has low casualty numbers for a reason; he and Rex aren't in the habit of throwing away lives if there's another good option.  “Okay, you’re on the verge of winning the ground battle, you said.  These ‘sprites are atmo-rated for short periods, what if we bring half of our pilots down to reinforce you?  Prevent any ships from taking off while you hunt him down.  What do you think are your chances of finding him before his capital ships get their breath back and start picking us off?”

Obi-Wan considers this good and long, his raspy breathing ever-so-slightly audible over the commlink.  “I think we could do it,” he finally answers, cool and professional.  “And there may be a way to improve our chances.”

/B/

Anakin and his pilots—all 501st men, 42 total—end up exchanging their Aethersprites for more atmo-friendly vessels before heading to the planet.  They don't know how long they’ll need to be down there, and they need to be fast and fuel-efficient in the face of air resistance because getting to the surface around Grievous’ blockade means entering the atmosphere hundreds of klicks away from their actual target.

It’s a tense 20 minutes getting to the planet, and an even tenser 35 or so flying over the endlessly rolling horizon before the battlefield is even in sight.  The journey does provide an opportunity to surveil Arami’s ecology (and shoot the shit over comms).  It’s a relatively diverse planet, more so than a lot of the small Outer Rim worlds that were subjected to terraforming and ecological seeding tens of thousands of years ago, in the murkiest ages of the galaxy's history.  The vista that opens itself up to them is breathtakingly verdant in the bright sunlight of an afternoon.  They fly over dense forests of green and yellow trees, broken by large expanses of meadowland clothed in a multitude of colors and a few large, barren patches of exposed grimy rock face.  The only man-made structures to be seen are two enormous coral-red obelisks with rounded tips—a few miles tall, and no telling how deep they extend—that stick out at odd angles from the earth like paralyzed fingers, one a good fifteen miles to their left and another silhouetted against the horizon behind them.  Ancient terraforming equipment, abandoned millennia ago by unknown actors.  The area they’re flying over is hilly, in the sense of many very small, steep hills on flat land rather than larger, rolling hills that might lead up to a mountain range.  There is a mountain range in the distance, however, becoming more and more distinct from the horizon as they approach it.  Obi-Wan’s battlefield is supposedly a valley within a valley, carved out in odd, steep dips and pools by an ancient, long-dried acidic lake.

When that battlefield finally comes into view over a forested ridge, Anakin does a double take and momentarily questions whether he came to the wrong coordinates, because there is a lake.  A good portion of the valley within the valley is flooded with what would look like normal dirty water if not for the warnings his dashboard starts beeping at him about airborne gas content as they fly over.  Circling closer, he can make out the carnage—hundreds of inert droids sticking out of the muck in the shallow areas, looking forlorn and corroded.  There are also a number of felled trees, and a handful of clone bodies.  Anakin forces himself not to look away from what the chemicals are doing to them.

The new lake only really fills the bottom of the valley, a bit more than a mile in diameter.  The wreckage of a cliff face on the far side of the valley is still spitting out a merry stream of water and spray, evidently the last dregs from some sort of underground reservoir.  In the trees around its edges, he can see the 212th at a doll-like scale, busy with various tasks in their air-filtering helmets.  A good 40 members of Torrent Company should be down there too, accompanying Ahsoka; Rex has never been one for space battles, or sitting around when there’s action to be taken.  There’s no blue to be seen around the lake, though.  Anakin casts out his awareness and feels Rex’s steady glow near Ahsoka’s brighter signature somewhere outside the rim of the valley, to the south, along with a number of other familiar signatures.  So Torrent is shirking on cleanup.  Typical.  Many of the 212th clones stop to wave their arms and cheer when their 501st brothers pass overhead.

Anakin hesitates for a moment before keying in Obi-Wan’s frequency.  “We’re passing over the battlefield now.”  He almost adds You really did a number on ‘em, and then remembers himself and clears his throat.  “Three minutes to the rendezvous.  Any eyes on Grievous?  I don't want to tip him off.”

Obi-Wan’s side of the comm crackles slightly, and when he speaks he sounds out of breath.  “He’s taken the bait.  We managed to shoot him down on a plateau to the east, and since then two scouts have reported him making for the western mountains on a landspeeder.  I’m in pursuit with a squadron, ETA 15.  If you circle around low behind the rim of the next valley in this chain, on the northern side, you should be able to get there before him without his knowledge.”

Anakin bites off a retort—Obi-Wan didn't have to tell him where to fly—and confirms understanding before relaying the orders back to his men.  All but twelve of them break off to begin patrol patterns in the middle atmosphere, a task made easier by the fact that the flow of landers between Grievous’ destroyers and the ground has dried up completely.  The twelve bombers who remain in line behind him waggle their wings at their brothers once more before wheeling around to the north, ducking low behind a rising ridge, and then turning west.

This low, they can see more clearly the devastation wrought by the earlier bombing run, a mad splattering of violent impact craters and uprooted trees scarring the forest below.  Scratch, the fourth pilot in line behind him, whistles tinnily into the shared comm channel, and his batchmate Pyrrhic snickers.  Evidently, the battle started on the foothills outside the valley they just left, and shifted when Obi-Wan learned from the Shadow about the reservoir concealed in the nearby hill.  The worst of the initial bombers’ signature is probably hidden under the dark surface of the acid lake, back on the battlefield proper.

Taking advantage of the moment of respite, Anakin comms Yularen’s second lieutenant.  “Lieutenant Quellin, how are things looking up there?”

“Not great, sir,” Quellin replies tinnily after a moment’s hesitation.  There's some weird interference on the connection; Anakin prays to the Force with all he’s worth that the Seps haven't found a new way to cut their comms.  Oh wait, no, that’s just Quellin’s breathing.  He must be holding the comm way too close to his mouth.  “We’re holding out, but we’re feeling the loss of numbers.  Both primary swarms have collapsed; we’re looking at a tight-knit dogfight over the nose, and it’s freed up a lot more of their small craft to come hassle us.  And their back two destroyers are beginning to move out of formation.  We may have to reposition.”

Anakin resists the urge to curse, since Quellin is a bit jumpy for a naval officer.  “Got it.  Tell Yularen we shouldn't be more than 30, barring unforeseen circumstances.”  The overwhelming likelihood of unforeseen circumstances doesn't really need explaining.

He can hear Quellin lick his lips over the comm, which is unpleasant.  “Understood, sir.  Over and out.”

The engines purr as he pulls the joystick a few degrees further back.  The land they're flying over keeps sloping upward and upward, until he registers that they're about midway up into the mountain range they saw on the horizon flying in.  Soon, they should be coming into view of the rendezvous coordinates, as indicated by the glowing dots on his HUD.

It drops open suddenly before them: a large open meadow, extending a good thirty yards in every direction before hitting the sharp cliff face behind it.  He’s disoriented for a moment, before he puts together how its comparatively gentle slope renders it all but invisible when approached from below.  It’s beautiful, actually, a lush carpet of green grass starred with white and yellow wildflowers that nearly glow in the afternoon sun.  The only interruption to its smooth satiny sweep is an abrupt little plateau—no, wait, it’s the roof of a bunker of some kind, built right into the meadow with a cap of grass over it, made of that same coral-colored material as the defunct terraforming spires they flew past earlier.  This must be the Shadow’s listening post.  A moment later, two small figures climb out of a hatch in the exposed sliver of red metal wall and turn to watch the bombers expectantly, hands clasped placidly over their dark robes.  Anakin dips a wing in acknowledgment and pushes the joystick smoothly to the right, curving around to find a concealed landing spot on the northern edge of the meadow.

His ship’s comm system beeps, and then an unfamiliar voice is filling the cockpit.  “Knight Skywalker?  This is Knight Kallist.”  Her voice is smooth and low in a way he wouldn't associate with females in most species; Bothan sex differentiation is a little different from the humanoid evolutionary standard.  “Master Kenobi mentioned you just got to the surface, did he have time to brief you fully?”

Right to business, this one.  “More or less, yes.  Good to meet you, Knight Kallist.  We'll be establishing our ambush screen immediately, since Obi-Wan thinks Grievous is only ten minutes behind us.  He intercepted your signal, as planned.”

“We look forward to meeting you both, after finishing this.”

Oh right, “we.”  “Obi—Master Kenobi said you have kids with you?”

“Yes.”  A slight heaviness weighs down her serene Jedi tone.  “My new padawan, Woto’e, is twelve-equivalent, and we’ve picked up a human youngling.  Seven, we think.  So I may not be able to help much in the fight to come.”

Shit, the padawan is twelve?  They just keep sending them out here younger.  “Understood.  Keep them in the lookout post, and we’ll do our best to pin him down out here.”

“If he does get in, it might not be so bad,” she answers in a thoughtful tone, with perhaps a…hint of indecision?  Interesting.  He spots a clearing in the forest fringing the meadow, and he and his pilots shift into a vertical descent.  “The architecture inside might serve well for an ambush site.  But may the Force will it does not come to that.”

“We can hope.  Over and out.”  A moment after the call crackles to an end, he is rocked by the gentle jolt of a successful landing.  He keys back into the pilots’ shared frequency.  “Alright, boys, you know the plan.  Stealth screen, radio silence; we want him a good distance into the open and trapped against the cliff face before he has any idea we’re here.  You wait for my signal, and then, and only then, do we fill this chuff-sucking mudcrutch with holes.”

“Yes, sir!” the men chorus, with varying degrees of suppressed enthusiasm.  He cuts comms and pops the hatch on his fighter, swinging himself over the lip and onto the ground in one motion.  He stumbles a little on the landing, right knee twinging unexpectedly.  It’s been bothering him on and off ever since he twisted it on that one moon near Florrum, and then had to keep running on it for a good four days without rest.  They had lost a lot of good men in the initial ambush—bad intel, which he’s starting to believe is the only kind of intel—and the medics were too busy hauling the injured across half the moon to make a proper brace, so he just tore a sleeve off one of his filthy tunics and hoped for the best.  It seems that his best was not enough.

 He hurriedly straightens as Wingspan and Scratch jog past him.  Scratch offers a quick salute and a wide, feral grin that Anakin makes himself return, while shy, serious Wingspan just nods, looking focused.  And then he’s alone in the clearing, breathing deep to suppress the sudden queasiness in his stomach.  He hopes he doesn't get either of them killed today.  Anakin tests his weight on his right leg once more for good measure and then jogs out after them.  His boots crunch in the leaf litter as he leaves the clearing and enters the sun-dappled forest.  Around him, thick gray trunks soar up solidly, gracefully, standing silent and innocent of what is to come.

/B/

Anakin lays on his stomach in the dirt and breathes slowly.  Between the spiky leaves of the bush in front of him, the meadow lays deserted.  He can feel Knight Kallist’s calm signature beneath the ground, dampening the nervous energy of two younglings that makes him slightly dizzy.

Twelve clones can’t do much to ambush Grievous by themselves.  They’re here to hold him until Obi-Wan and his men can catch up, and if they can't kill him, then they’ll all have to be ready to run, because Anakin’s airborne patrols will converge on this location in under 30 seconds and turn the meadow into a burning wasteland.  But it’ll be better if they can take Grievous down the hard way—no uncertainties.  And to stall for time so that they can take him down the hard way, Anakin has twelve good men with strong wills but breakable bones, a Shadow preoccupied with maintaining fake comm chatter and protecting the future of the Order, and—as a last resort—two children.  Only one of them trained.

Out of the corner of his eye, about forty feet away, he can just see Wingspan’s foot and the tip of his blaster, peeking out from behind the trunk of a thick tree.  Anakin breathes out again, shifts so his left hip isn’t pressed into a rock.  The spiky leaves flutter.

The droning of a speeder enters the clearing.

Grievous bursts into the meadow and stops his speeder bike perfectly in the center of Anakin’s field of vision.  Lamentably, he looks a bit scorched but otherwise unharmed.  He hops off to stand beside the speeder—a leather and metal GAR design, Anakin notes darkly—looking around with slow, predatory movements and bleeding malevolent confusion into the Force.  He’s wary of the open space, the sheer wall—he knows as well as they do that he is weak to flat open terrain on which his mobility offers little advantage, along with ranged fire that he doesn't have the Force aptitude to consistently deflect.

Grievous takes a step away from the speeder.  Wingspan has gone perfectly still in Anakin’s peripherals.  It’s now or never.

Anakin narrows his eyes and reaches forward in the Force, toward the fuel tank of the speeder.  Hidden from sight, it begins to churn.

Two months ago, he would not have been confident in his ability to do this, but he’s been experimenting.  Heating things up comes naturally to him: He just reaches down into his chest, to where the heat of the twin suns is always smoldering, ready to ignite to a steady burn the moment he dwells too long on the war, or the clones, or the Council, or Obi-Wan’s judgmental eyebrow, or the indolence of the Republic, or what happened to his mother.

Anakin grits his teeth, reaches out, and feels the phantom pressure of Watto’s boot on his neck.

The fuel tank explodes with a bang.   A huge fireball blooms in the clearing; smoking debris rains on the grass.  The frame of the speeder groans and collapses as Grievous is thrown off his clawed feet.

Signal received, Anakin’s men leap forward like anoobas loosed from their chains.  They don’t break cover, but come to the very edge of it, pelting Grievous with whirring blaster bolts from all directions.  Grievous roars and stumbles, struggling to get to his feet under the barrage, struggling to draw a saber to deflect.  Anakin gives him a Force shove to the legs just as he’s about to regain his footing, sending him to the ground again.  “Kenobi!” Grievous growls in a voice of pure rage, and Anakin has to stifle a laugh.  No, not this time.

Wingspan jumps down from his tree branch and moves closer, aim steady.  His men should be moving through the trees all over, firing intermittently, making it seem as if there are many more clones firing on Grievous than just twelve.  Grievous’ armor is tough, they’re firing from a good distance away, and he’s managed to draw a saber now, so much of it just bounces off or misses, but Anakin sees four canny shots spark off joints and faceplate and make Grievous flinch.

And then Grievous ducks abruptly to the side, rolls to his feet, and barrels like a steam engine towards the trees on the right side of the clearing, where Pyrrhic and Ballast are scrambling for better cover.

Not fucking today.  Anakin shoves himself to his feet and sprints to intercept.

Grievous turns to meet him.  Twin blue lightsabers ignite: Now Grievous is wielding one blue and one green.  With his first strike, all his momentum and the Force behind him, he manages to shove Grievous off balance.  Grievous parries sloppily, and has to drop and dodge to recover from it.

Then Grievous strikes back, and the tables turn.  Force, he’s strong.  And wickedly fast—Anakin puts one foot wrong, has to duck to avoid getting his skull sliced in half.  And then all of a sudden he’s on the back foot and can’t seem to recover his momentum.  Parry!  Parry! Dodge!  Fall back!  Parry!  Fall back!  Duck!— and he has just narrowly avoided death six times in the span of two seconds.  His knee twinges.  His breathing picks up as if he’s been running laps for the last ten minutes.  He tries to dart in under Grievous’ guard and gets a sharp metal elbow to the kidney as Grievous twists unnaturally and leaps over him.  Grits his teeth against a cry as he whirls and forces himself back into form.

Parry!  Parry!  Parry!  Dodge!  It feels like fighting off an army, lightsabers on every side at once.  And he’s getting exceedingly frustrated with just defending.  He tries a Force push, to make some breathing room; Grievous braces and doesn't budge. Anakin growls, ducks, swipes for the head, tries again; this time, Grievous slides back a few paces, ripping furrows in the grass beneath one foot and one hand.  Anakin closes: Parry, twist, swipe for the waist.  He can smell Grievous’ fetid breath as he growls out some grandstanding Anakin’s too in the zone to hear.  He comes so close to severing Grievous’ chassis from his hips—and then he nearly loses an arm and he’s on the back foot again, defending, defending.

He’s panting in earnest now.  Grievous doesn’t even look winded.  He grits his teeth, pushes himself deeper into the ocean of precognition.  Just when he’s thinking he needs to risk some more Ataru acrobatics to end this horizontal stalemate, Grievous unexpectedly vaults over him.  He deflects two rapid downward slashes as he whirls to keep him in sight, and then all of the sudden Grievous is on the other side.  The cyborg does an odd half-twist to the left and then he’s stabbing low at Anakin’s left side and slashing high at his right shoulder simultaneously with his two left arms, counting on Anakin missing the high blade while he is momentarily blinded by the noontime sun.

Only Anakin isn't blinded by the sun.

He’s wearing sunglasses.

And in the split second before Grievous can recover his balance, Anakin deflects the lower saber downwards, ducks inward out of the way of the shoulder slash, shoves his opponent further off balance with his left shoulder, and switches his grip in the air between them (thanks, Snips) in order to stab straight down into Grievous’ extended left leg.  A twitch severs it cleanly at the knee.

Grievous recoils with a mechanical roar of rage, falling into an unnatural backwards crabwalk that drops him beneath Anakin’s follow-up swipe to the head.  Then he’s surging away spider-style too quickly to follow, narrowing clouded yellow eyes at his opponent from a safer distance, and Anakin is left coiled tense and panting in his ready position, a little stunned that he actually got a hit in.  Somewhere in the treeline, a clone—Scratch or Pyrrhic—gives a little shout of disbelieving encouragement.

The moment of triumph is short-lived.  Because Grievous surges forward again on all fours—fives?—and the movement is so unnatural that he can barely follow it.  He snaps his saber up on pure precognition, and grunts when the force of the blow rattles him down to his heels.  Grievous growls, blowing stale air in his face.  Another saber—left.  Right?  His hips—Anakin missteps, trying to predict the movement.  A blue saber whirrs past his head.  His own narrowly avoided decapitation flows through him in the Force.  Grievous strikes again and again , and then palm-strikes him in the diaphragm while he’s still struggling to track the lightsabers.  He flies backward and rolls over twice, all the breath knocked out of him.  Makes it to his knees just in time to roll again, avoid ending up in chunks.  He wheezes, sees spots.  Parries, staggers back.  Parry.  Back.  Manages to knock the blue saber out of Grievous’ grip, but he’s already drawn another with his other right hand.  But now Grievous is slowing, marginally.  He could win this, maybe, if he could just catch his breath—

He’s sunk so deep in the roiling ocean that he barely hears the shout.  “The General!”

Thank the Force and the Rain-Bringer himself, their reinforcements have arrived.

He risks a glance as the battle pivots so that he’s facing them, glimpses helmets cresting the ridge, many blue-striped— huh? —clones and a ginger on speeders, and then he glimpses the blue tips of montrals over Obi-Wan’s shoulders and fuck, Obi-Wan brought Ahsoka with him?!  Why couldn't he leave her to command the cleanup in his absence?  He almost lost Ahsoka to Grievous once, he won’t—he won't—

But there is no time to lose his head (heh), because Grievous nearly severs his remaining hand and then a full squadron is raising their blasters behind him and Anakin sprints away from Grievous and throws himself into a roll.  “Open fire!” Obi-Wan shouts.

It’s as if the very air explodes.

Red bolts whizz and crackle and fill the air with heat as all 40 of the Torrent members who accompanied Ahsoka, along with a scattering of 212th CTs and his own twelve pilots, lay down a blanket of fire.  Grievous gets hit—once, twice.  Most of the bolts bounce off his sabers or armor, but they cause him to stumble back, losing his predatory grace.  And then, on a dime, the cyborg about-faces and spider-crawls obscenely fast toward the exposed side of the bunker, one of his right arms dangling uselessly as the joint sparks.

The mixed squadron sprints after him, though Obi-Wan hangs back—injured, Anakin registers with a twinge in his gut.  Ahsoka jogs past on the left as Anakin levers himself to his feet, followed closely by Rex, Fives, and Oz; their familiar signatures warm the Force.  “Come on, Master!”  He shakes his head clear—maybe he should take a stim—and runs to catch up.

He and Ahsoka draw ahead of the clones with Force-assisted speed, and Grievous is twenty yards ahead of them, then fifteen—but he's reached the side of the bunker and cuts his way in with two lightsabers, disappears into the hole.  Anakin’s heart rate spikes in time with that of the two barely-shielded younglings inside.  Ahsoka stumbles with it.  “There’s kids in there?!”

“Yep,” he answers, and of one mind, they throw themselves into the hole.

/B/

They immediately have to arrest their forward momentum, nearly tripping over heaps of black cables.  The second thing they notice is: Where the hell is Grievous?  The inside of the bunker is dark, lit only by the light coming in through this hole and a few oddly soft-hued bulbs tracking out a winding path on the ceiling.  He has to squint more than he should.  Damn sunglasses.   The space is low-ceilinged and mostly open, a huge rectangular room maybe forty yards by fifty, with big pieces of rusty machinery in mounds forming half-walls that divide the space without much rhyme or reason.  It would be more open if it weren’t absolutely stuffed with thick cables of indeterminate purpose.  The walls are obscured by bundles of crisscrossing cables extending diagonally from the ceiling down through holes in the floor, the ceiling itself is adorned with black cables dangling in loopy arcs like streamers, and there are cables dropping straight down from the ceiling through open space and snaking along the ground in all directions.  These hanging cables significantly obscure their vision.  Rex swings a leg over the rim of the hole behind them, and Anakin signals him to wait, scanning suspiciously.  This is not the ideal environment to fight Grievous in.

There’s a breath at Anakin’s right, and he jolts and almost takes Knight Kallist’s head off where she has managed to appear next to him.  Damn Shadows.   Up close, she’s a Bothan with rusty brown fur and a boxy, blunt snout, dressed in dark brown robes belted at the waist and a raised hood.  She points to a large piece of machinery toward the middle of the room, a good thirty yards away, and then indicates the faint outline of an Aethersprite-sized circle in the ceiling.  “He’s trying to open the hatch,” she breathes.

“The children?” Ahsoka whispers past him.

Hidden, she hand-signs, tilting her head toward the right side of the room.

“Ahsoka,” Anakin whispers, and motions her back to the hole as calmly as he can manage.  She pretends she doesn’t understand him.  Sithspit.  Dread pools in his lungs, but there’s no time.

Turning back to Rex, he whispers a quick order to advance cautiously, certain it will be quickly relayed to the rest through helmet comms.  Then they split up, Ahsoka advancing along the left wall, Kallist fading away to his right, and Anakin advancing up the middle.  A stream of clones begins to flow through the hole behind them, advancing into the space with blasters raised.

The bunker ripples with the sounds of subtle movement: The tap-rustle of plasteel armor, the light thud-scrape of boots on metal, a tenor humming from the walls.  Metallic claws tap-tap at the edge of Anakin’s hearing.  He can feel Grievous’ awareness of them, his awareness of their awareness of him, as they close in slowly on his hiding spot.  They’re about two thirds of the way to their objective—or he is, he’s lost track of Kallist—when he feels a stab of cruel victory from Grievous’ signature.  With a clunk and a grinding, mechanical roar, a shaft of sunlight blazes down into the twilight of the bunker as the circular hatch in the ceiling above Grievous begins to open outward.

His heart seizes, and a few clones gasp behind him—they’re going to lose him!  Anakin scrambles up onto the nearest piece of machinery—maybe if he leaps from obstacle and obstacle, he can get there faster than trying to pick his way through the cables on the ground.  This gives him a perfect, increasingly well-lit view as Grievous straightens up from behind his cover—and a tiny red Zabrak in brown robes bursts out of a maintenance hatch in the machinery eight yards away, dashing at Grievous’ looming bulk with a lightsaber drawn and horrid determination on his face.  Visible in the cupboard he has left behind is an even tinier human, dark-complexioned, their terrified little face covered in tears and snot.

“Woto-e, no!” Kallist screams, voice cracking at the center, forced to give away her ambush position behind Grievous.  The Zabrak padawan startles and stumbles in his attempt to break his momentum, just as Grievous swings.  The ensuing fall saves his life.  And then he is backpedaling away from the looming cyborg as Kallist vaults an engine block to throw herself between them and Anakin sprints over tripping hazards with Force-aided dexterity to join them.

Knight Kallist catches both of Grievous’ lightsabers on her own, her blade dipping with the force of it.  One of them goes for her side, and she has to twist to deflect it.  In that moment, Grievous unexpectedly darts past her for the Zabrak padawan still on the ground—

And jerks to a halt, awkwardly, slashing wildly at nothing.  It takes a moment to identify the cause: Ahsoka snuck up behind him.  She’s managed to get a loose cable hooked around his lower right wrist with the Force.

Quick as a striking nexu, he turns on her, and Anakin’s heart jolts again—but Oz, one of Torrent’s oldest, darts forward around Kallist to grab his empty left hand by the wrist, slip a noose of cable around it, and book it the other direction as fast as he can.

Grievous screeches, pulled in two directions, and tugs mightily at the cables.  Ahsoka and Oz strain, begin to slide towards him, but then Kallist has grabbed onto the cable behind Oz, then another clone, and two clones grab on behind Ahsoka, and the cables pull outward again.

Anakin shakes himself into action, running with the surge of clones all around him into the now-sunlit center of the room.  With the Force, he tugs on a cable dangling free from the ceiling, floats it over to just the right position to tangle around Grievous’ neck as he struggles.  Denal catches on, grabs the other end of the cable and pulls backward.  Grievous regains the presence of mind to bring down his right saber to slice through Ahsoka’s cable around his lower right wrist, but then Kallist ducks out of her own tug-of-war team to knock his left saber out of his upper hand, and two of the 212th guys snag that with another cable Anakin pulled down from the ceiling.  It’s bedlam, deafening: the room is full of clones and jedi shouting over each other and over the mechanical grinding.  A lone clone gets a floor cable around Grievous’ remaining, thrashing foot, and Anakin leaps to reinforce him; together, they give it a firm tug that pulls the writhing cyborg off his feet and jolts the whole straining, heaving network of cables around them.  Anakin has to duck as a bunch of the guys start running around the whole scene with cables stretched between them, sparking with disbelieving glee in the Force.  They manage to tangle Grievous’ torso and hips, nearly catching a number of their own brothers in the process.  The cables are stacking up faster than Grievous can cut them!

Anakin feels a few more guys grab hold of the leg cable behind him, so he drops it to lunge for Grievous’ last saber, but Ahsoka beats him to it, leaping up and kicking off Grievous’ frantically twisting chest to knock his blade out of his hand and jerk the hand down with her behind his back, practically dislocating the mechanical joint.  Grievous screeches again, but this time it sounds less like anger and more like pain.  Or fear.  His writhing against his bonds is getting weaker and weaker as he scrabbles for traction with his one foot.

Then one of the guys holding his upper left arm gets the bright idea to climb atop of the convenient defunct machinery around them, and soon Grievous’ heaving ceases entirely as he is hoisted into the air, helplessly pinioned in his own personal spiderweb.  Just in time, as the loud mechanical grinding noise finally stops.  The whole frantically moving scene stills and goes silent, leaving Grievous suspended uselessly in the middle of a perfect circle of bright afternoon sunlight from the open hatch, his tethers stretching out in all directions into shadow.

/B/

For a moment, no one is sure what to do.

The thirty or so clones not actively holding cables spread out throughout the vicinity, blasters trained on the immobilized cyborg.  They bleed deadly purpose into the Force.  Knight Kallist is looking at Anakin, he notices with a start; she must be more recently knighted at him, if only by a few months.  When it becomes clear that he will not take the lead on what must come next, she drops her cable and walks over to stand in the circle of light before Grievous.  Her hood has fallen back to expose sharp, twitching ears, all her attention trained on the abomination before her.  “General Grievous.  You are under arrest for crimes against sentient life and sedition against the Republic.  Surrender, and we will show you mercy.”

Grievous stares down at her for a moment with wide yellow eyes.  It’s unusual to be able to see him so clearly, thrown into high contrast.  Abruptly, he wheezes with what Anakin struggles to recognize as laughter, the liver-spotted skin around his eyes crumpling in his mirth.  “Mercy?” he ponders in his staticky voice, drawing out the word like a delectable piece of steak.  “You think to offer me mercy?”

“You will be dealt with on Coruscant in accordance with Republic law,” Knight Kallist responds with admirable calm, a stable brown pillar in the pitiless light.

Grievous shakes silently with the last dregs of his laughter.  The gut-churning mixture of amusement and hate in the Force makes Anakin wrinkle his nose.  “And what do you think will happen if you take me there?”

“You will be given a fair trial and receive a just sentence.  If you offer information, you may escape execution.”

Grievous considers for a moment, then shakes his great, masked head, slowly and deliberately.  “My master will free me.  He has not failed me yet.”  A sly smile crawls through his vowels, becoming more audible through the static of the vocoder.  “And then—he will give me an army.  A better army, and set me at their head.  Pry the doors to your Temple open, and let me in.  And then I will descend deep into the bowels of your Temple until I find the warm dark cubbies where you keep your young.”

“Shut up,” Anakin growls suddenly from the shadows in front of the display, an odd feeling overtaking him.  His stomach turns over, ice locks his joints, and there is an odd trembling in his hands.

Grievous’ lamplight yellow eyes bore into his.  “I will draw the weapons I took from their older siblings.  I will block the doors and break the locks, so they cannot run.  At least at first, it probably will not occur to them to run.”

“Shut up.” Anakin hears himself say, louder, through clenched teeth.  His whole body is shaking.  His voice rings oddly in his ears.

“And then…?” Grievous says softly, almost sweetly, only for him.  “...I will slice them open like ripe fruits, one by one.  I will spill them, like bursting fruits, in your Temple’s sacred dark places.”  In the Force, he smiles.

Anakin sees red; his vision blurs.  Almost without conscious thought, he reaches out with both hands and pulls.  An invisible force torques the plasteel, then slowly, with an aching screech, pries open a narrow gap in Grievous’ armored chassis, exposing hints of something squirming in darkness.  Some small part clatters out and onto the floor, and Anakin hears the little youngling make a vomiting noise behind him.

Grievous lets out a mechanical roar and writhes.  Blaster shots from the squad behind Anakin bounce off his armor but just miss the gap, as the cables restraining his arms and leg strain. A cable snaps, then another, and then with a yelp the two clones holding his lower right arm are pulled off their feet and dragged forward.

Ahsoka darts forward to help them.

A cable snaps.

The rage is instantly replaced by an ice-cold shock of fear.

Grievous’ huge, neck-breaking hand darts out, like a striking snake, toward Ahsoka’s vulnerable head, and his body’s not going to get there in time.  He’s not going to get there in time.  Between milliseconds, Anakin throws himself forward in the Force.

Time stops.  For a single endless instant, he is narrowed to a point, to a line; he is nothing but pure intent; he is a crackling channel of adrenaline and terror.

/B/

Anakin snaps back to himself as Grievous makes a garbled noise and slumps to the cheerfully lit ground, smoking.  The last flickers of electricity crackle over the corpse.  What was inside the chassis is thoroughly cooked.  In the absence of normal reasoning, Anakin’s mind produces a first, involuntary thought: At least it doesn’t really smell this time.

The room is silent.

He looks up.  Around him, familiar sets of armor are frozen in their ready positions, helmets turned toward him, fear in the air.  No, wait—they’re not looking at him.  He turns around, following Ahsoka’s horrified gaze.  Barely four yards away at his 4:00, two wide-eyed younglings and one Jedi Knight are standing in a little huddle, staring at him.

Oh, shit.  Oh shit, oh shit, think fast, think fast—!

“Ouch!” Anakin exclaims loudly to the room at large.  “That hurt!  I really shouldn’t have, um”—quick scan of his surroundings—“stepped on those live electrical cables!  Good thing my metal arm conducts electricity so well, or I’d be toast!”  He holds the arm up for emphasis, smiling winningly.

A pause.  The little youngling, wide eyes blinking up at Anakin, speaks despite the padawan’s aborted attempts to shush them.  “But wasn’t it the other arm, Master?”

Anakin’s smile twitches.  “Was it?  I’m pretty sure it was this one!  Although it’s hard to remember because it did hurt so bad, you know?”

There’s another awkward silence, broken when Ahsoka leaves off silently gaping and rushes to his side.  “Oh, no, Master, are you hurt?” she enthuses very convincingly.  “I saw you get electrocuted!  By that live wire!  You really need to be more careful, this happens so often already!”  She stands on her tiptoes to rest her elbow on Anakin’s shoulder—it’s still a few inches too high, even when he leans down to compensate—and joins him in smiling guilelessly at their audience.  Or possibly threateningly, given the two older Jedi’s increasingly intimidated expressions.

“Haha, yeah, me and electricity, you know, not a great combo!  But hey, Grievous is dead.  Uh.  Yay?”

Fives takes that as his cue to snap out of it next and turns to the bulk of their men, still kneeling next to a dropped cable with his blaster out.  “Oh yeah!  Hey everybody, Grievous is dead!”

Still no response.  From behind him, Rex snaps out two crisp signals with his hands.

“YEAHHHHHH!!!”  As one, the clones break into raucous, unanimous celebration.  There’s whistling, loud cheering, clones running everywhere, tripping over cables, men are chest-bumping in full armor and clapping each other on the back, it’s chaos as all of the exuberance of winning a battle against one of the Republic’s worst enemies hits them at once, and it’s only a little bit forced.

Anakin’s wrist comm beeps, too quiet in all the ruckus.  Luckily, he notices the blinking light and quickly walks to the threshold of the bunker to answer it, shouting over the sounds of celebration.  “Admiral?”

“Generals!  The droids’ defense just completely fell apart, I think we’ve managed to take out three of their main destroyers!  What happened down there, did you succeed in killing Grievous?”

Anakin feels a real smile begin to tug at the corner of his mouth.  “We did indeed, Admiral.”

“Excellent.”  Yularen is struggling to be professional, but there’s a childlike brightness in his tiny blue face that Anakin has never seen before.  The admiral clears his throat: “Ahem.  We may not need your men up here after all.  There’s…not that much to do, really—they haven’t fired on us in four minutes now, and their small craft appear to be almost wiped out.  It’s…a fairly unambiguous victory, generals.”

Anakin nods acknowledgement, and then a staggering clone jostles him from behind, and he accidentally snaps the comm closed, ending the call.  But it’s okay, Obi-Wan can handle the rest of the details.  A kind of disbelieving joy bubbles up to the top of Anakin’s skull, and he starts grinning for real.  Then suddenly Ahsoka tackles Anakin around the shoulders from the side, whooping like a madwoman, and he almost falls, swinging her around to bleed off energy.  He adds in one more spin just for fun.  She’s laughing, and it’s infectious, and all of a sudden it’s not about distraction anymore because holy kriff, holy kriff, they’ve been fighting Grievous for two years now.

He’s so excited to tell Padme!  He wants to be the first, if at all possible—wants to see that huge smile she gets when something big and genuinely good happens in the galaxy.  Grievous was a key player out of only a few actual key players on the Separatist side.  His death?  It means hope.  More hope than they’ve felt in a long time.

(In the chaos, the small recorder droid that was previously hidden in Grievous’ chassis scuttles inconspicuously away, in search of a Republic lander with a hijack-able long-range signal.)

/B/

Outside, Obi-Wan stands in the blaster-scorched, sunlit meadow with the remainder of the 212th squadron who came with him.  He’s clutching his side and surrounded by a good thirty dead battle droids.  Ah, so that's why he didn't come in to help.  Watching their backs, as always.

Anakin jogs up, leaving Ahsoka being carried around on the shoulders of several clones in giddily unprofessional celebration.  Anakin is so ecstatic that he doesn't even feel angry at the sight of his old master standing there, shouting orders so confidently, like the perfect Jedi he is.  In the moment, it doesn't feel so important.  When are he and Obi-Wan not mad at each other, in some way?  But in the end, this man is his—closest friend.  (And Obi-Wan didn't see what he did in there.  He doesn't know.  He doesn't need to.)

“You hear Yularen, Obi-Wan?  The Seps are down to one fucking competent general!”  And overwhelming numbers, but that's beside the point.  “This time next month, you could be sipping Correllian brandy in your pajamas on Coruscant.  I’ll even make you that tea you like—the Ryloth blend?  That we can't import anymore?”  Feeling warm all over and a little dizzy, he goes to throw an arm around Obi-Wan's shoulders.  “Whaddya say to that, Master?”

Obi-Wan moves away, wards him off with a strained smile.  Okay, maybe Obi-Wan can still put a damper on his happiness.  “I heard.  It would have been better to apprehend Grievous, but given his propensity for escape, maybe this is the best option.”

“You know it was the best damn option,” Anakin responds, trying to maintain a joking tone.  It comes out too flat.  “And he wasn't exactly unarmed.  Totally up to Code.”

“Hmm.”  Obi-Wan isn't meeting his eyes.  And then, after a pause: “It still bothers me that we don't know what the acid was for.”

Anakin startles.  In the wake of killing Grievous, he had completely forgotten about all of the remaining unknowns from this operation.  An uneasy feeling starts to creep in around the edges of the lingering excitement.  “Oh, right, it’s for the two round-nosed ships.  I got close enough to see during the fighting: The modifications are built onto really antique ship models, maybe 150 or 200 years old.  Their hyperdrives would be compatible with Man’Telani acid.”

Obi-Wan nods thoughtfully.  Then: “What happens when a ship tries to leave its hyperlane, but stay in hyperspace?”

Anakin frowns, struggling to switch gears.  To think engineering instead of war, to think around the wave of hope that buoyed him out of the bunker.  “Well, the software isn’t really set up to handle that kind of transition, and if you accidentally drop into realspace at the wrong moment, there’s a pretty significant risk of getting spaghettified.  You can end up in a million tiny parts hurtling at high speed in completely different parts of the universe, which is…not good.  If you do successfully get out of the lane, eventually—usually within seconds—you hit the mass shadow of some realspace object and it rips you out of hyperspace, kills you instantly.  Same thing that happens when you try to skip the lanes, you know about that.  If you have really, really good computers, you might avoid that for awhile, but every course adjustment you make is going to slow you down, eventually drop you back into realspace automatically.”

“What if you were going in more or less a straight line, continuing along the trajectory of the lane?”

Anakin considers.  “You’d still have to make some course corrections to avoid things, but yeah, sure, it’d be a lot less?  And there’s less out here on the Rim to avoid, too.”

Obi-Wan chews his lip.  “Say you do have a really good computer.  Best we can currently make, no expense spared, and you’re out here on the Rim.  How far do you think you make it before you drop back into realspace?”

“Uhh, 1400, 1500 parsecs?  Maybe?”

“Hmm.”  Obi-Wan has progressed to the beard-stroking stage, which is never a good sign.  “And theoretically, what would happen if a very well-reinforced ship exited hyperspace without decreasing its speed?  If it wasn’t instantly, ah, spaghettified?”

“Well, it wouldn’t be torn apart across dimensions, but it would still be torn apart in the regular sense.  Physically.”

“Sure, but how much momentum could it maintain?”

Anakin is beginning to see the trajectory of these questions, and his gut very much does not like it.  “Well—I mean, dimensional physics isn’t really my thing, but given our own experiences getting pulled out of hyperspace, I want to say a lot.”

“And if it were aimed at something.”  It’s not a question.

“...It would be torn apart, but not before hitting the obstacle.  I would…have to do some math—”

“Anakin.”

“—but I’d say planet-level threat.”

They look at each other with wide eyes for an instant.  And then Obi-Wan is whipping out his wrist comm, entering the frequency with frantic speed as they both break into a sprint towards Anakin’s thirteen parked bombers.  “Admiral!  Admiral, you have to destroy the two blunt-nosed ships!  Ram them if you have to!  They’re going to launch a suicide run on Rothana!”

/B/

The Second Mantra of the Aurelian Reform Sith Code, c. 21 BBY

(translated from the Huttese)

1. From emotion, ambiguity.
2. From ignorance, growth.
3. From passion, autonomy.
4. From chaos, multiplicity.
5. From death, possibility.¹

2. The Force arises ceaselessly from the Force.²

Editor’s notes:

1. There is some debate among scholars regarding this line, as the Low Huttese word dukkra could, in this era, be translated as either “death” or “freedom.”  Given the Aurelian Sith attitude toward ambiguity, this scholar finds the intention fairly obvious.
2. Additional lightpen annotations have been recovered from a copy of what is believed to be the original file.  I have reproduced them below for the reader’s convenience; a reproduction of the original document can be found in Appendix F.

[in neat but plain handwriting] This is plagiarism, Barriss

[in a dignified cursive] (a) The Jedi Code is not copyrighted.  (b) We are Sith.

[in original hand] Fair point

[authorship subject to debate, but most handwriting experts agree that it matches a third, different hand found in other annotations] hehe :)

Chapter Text

As a rule, destroyers do not crash into each other at speed.  Not on purpose, anyway.

It happens on occasion, but for the most part, it’s simply too expensive a form of warfare.  A high-class destroyer can cost hundreds of trillions of credits to build, and as much to maintain even when not on active duty.  Anakin’s siege-breaking maneuver from last year wasn’t so much colliding as a slow, careful push, and even then, some of High Command wasn’t happy with the cost of repairs.  He took significantly more heat when Ahsoka used the Defender as a battering ram over Ryloth.  (She doesn't know, and she never will.  He will not let them shame her for making the right call.)

By the time Anakin, Ahsoka, Obi-Wan, the bulk of Torrent, and those of the 212th who crammed into their laarties in time have made it up to the Dominator, the sun is on the horizon of Arami from their position.  Obi-Wan rushes to the war room to comm the Council for an urgent consult on long-term strategy, leaving the tactics to Anakin.  Ahsoka goes off…somewhere, when he’s not looking.  Yularen has managed to box in the hammerhead ships and make vigorous contact using the cruiser Tranquility: Its nose is buried deep in the enemy’s crumpled side.  Of Grievous’ remaining two-and-a-half functional destroyers’ escort vessels, a good third have gotten their acts together and are focusing fire on the Tranquility.  Silent explosions riddle the length of both wounded behemoths.  The escape pods shoot out at high speeds, black dots where they pass in front of the planet and odd flickers elsewhere, revealed only by their motion in front of the stars.  As Arami’s sun slips partway behind its horizon, it softens into a brilliant corona, staining the whole scene with ethereal orange light.

The Separatist destroyers not engaged in rattling the Tranquility are focusing their fire on the Resolute, which is floating directly in the path of the other hammerhead ship and preventing its leap into the Syrvis-Arami-Gamorr hyperspace lane.  Between Anakin and the Resolute lies the entire battlefield, forty klicks of debris-riddled space. Execute Battalion is on the Resolute for this battle, while Carnivore Battalion, including Torrent,  mans the Dominator.  A Sep escort cruiser gets a lucky hit in near the Resolute’s hangar and Anakin can feel lives—his men’s lives—flaring and snuffed in the Force as white-armored dust motes drift outwards, spinning slowly.

On the bustling bridge of the Dominator, Anakin barely even needs to give the order: They’re already cutting across the battlefield to reinforce.  They take a hit, and the entire bridge rocks.  Like most of the seasoned veterans, Anakin manages to keep his feet, Force-catching a passing shiny before he can go down.  “Comm the Resolute!” Anakin roars over the metal’s groaning, and his communications officers hurl themselves into action.

While the ship rumbles and the connection loads, Anakin takes his chance to pop a pill from the blister pack of stims he shoved in his pocket this morning and swallow it dry.  He’s been awake a good fifteen hours now, and hasn't eaten in eight or so while engaging in near-constant combat.  And that’s not even considering the communal puking session all pilots bond over after flying rings in an Aethersprite for more than twenty minutes at a session.  He could go far longer without chemical assistance if he had to, but he likes how the stims clear his mind and suppress the hunger pulling restlessly at the edges of his stomach.  He has a feeling he'll need that for what comes next.

Finally, finally, they establish a clear connection, and Captain Popper of Execute Battalion looms large from the holoprojector.  “General!”

“Captain, what's your situation?”

Popper glances over his shoulder, curses quietly in Mando’a  at what he sees.  Refocuses.  “We’re holding the line, but I’m worried that half-dead Sep cruiser is gonna ram us to get us out of the way.”

“It’s still got working thrusters?”

“Hard to tell, but I don't like the angle.”

“Yeah, lot of that going around.”  Anakin grinds his teeth, considers.  “Hold your position, we’re almost there.  We’ll aim to take out the thrusters on that one first.  Damage assessment?”

“Significant.  We took two bad hits to port before we could bring her around, she’s listing a bit, and we've lost an engine.  The hyperdrive may also be compromised.”

Shit.  “Alright, Captain, we’re coming up on your starboard.  See if your guys can divert power from your hyperdrive to shields, if they haven't already.  We’ll turn this thing around in no time.”

Popper smiles grimly.  “I believe it, sir.  Resolute out.”  The holocall cuts, though the line remains open.

Stars scroll past as they put on a little more speed, juddering when they take another glancing hit.  Anakin grits his teeth as they pass by the remaining hammerhead ship, but at this speed and distance, they can't get a large cannon hit in without being tagged or hitting their own ships by accident; the plan is for the Renown and the Tribunal to take it down from both sides while the Dominator protects the Resolute’s blockade position.  The Tribunal is already firing away beneath the hammerhead’s starboard side.

(Behind them, the Tranquility and its prey drift into atmosphere and begin to catch fire, haloed by the red-orange corona against velvety black backing, and stars, this war could be beautiful if it were not so ugly.   Something about the way it strips the world down to its barest essentials, builds up towering institutions at a breakneck pace only to crush them again like so much scrap in the shredder.)

And then they're closing in on the embattled Resolute and the two destroyers harrying it, one on each side, and yeah, he really doesn't like the angle of the half-destroyed ship flanking the Resolute to starboard.  Grievous’ other undamaged destroyer peppers its port side with laserfire, mostly in vain.

“Fire!” yells Second Lieutenant Graft, first artillery officer on the Dominator, and the forward plasma cannons go off with a pulse and a roar.  And again.  And again.  It takes four strikes and the associated cooldown periods, and Anakin has to run off halfway through to make decisions about salvaging a damaged oxygen hub, but he’s back on the bridge in time for the finale.  The half-destroyed droid cruiser’s shields flicker into visibility one last time before shutting down entirely, and then the side of the ship ignites in a series of fireballs, quickly snuffed as the oxygen dissipates.  Anakin’s pulse slows.

Then the Force tightens like an indrawn breath.  Popper’s holo flickers back into existence.  “General!  It was a feint, they're ramming us from the other side!”

What?  How did they manage to turn without the Resolute noticing?  Shit.  Shit—

From this side, they can only see the Resolute buckle.  And then hundreds of lights are winking out in the Force all at once, leaving Anakin gasping like he’s been punched in the gut.

/B/

The pain is indescribable.  With great effort, he manages to catch hold of the bridge railing and wheeze out, “Where’s the hammerhead?!”

“About to enter hyperspace, sir!”

Shit, fuck, ma’kresh al’kal —“Get us in that lane before them!  Hyperspace, now!”

“Inputting coordinates!”

Gripping the railing hard enough to dent it, Anakin manages to straighten up.  “And where's Rex?” he croaks out, still sounding strangled.

Rex appears at his elbow like magic, helmet under his arm and breathing heavily.  “Sir?”

Out their portside windows, the hammerhead ship blurs as it zips into hyperspace and disappears.  Anakin’s heart pounds wildly and then an instant later, the stars streak around them and it’s visible in front of them again, the size of a thumb drive in the distance but getting bigger, slowly.  Too slowly.

Anakin forces his breath back under control, and the need for air fades into the heady sensation of hyperspace travel.  “Rex, I need you to take over the bridge while I try something.  And can you get me Ahsoka?”

“Yes, sir!  Are you trying to….”

“Yeah, we're not going to get close enough for tractor beams in time.  When Ahsoka gets here, tell her to join me.”  And with that, he drops into a messy lotus on the metal floor and falls into meditation.

It’s actually easier to do this in the heat of battle.  In the quiet Temple, he finds it almost impossible to meditate without something to do with his hands, but on the battlefield, with blood rushing in his ears and adrenaline making his skin buzz, it's nearly effortless to dive deep into the Force, immersing himself in its immense, churning currents.  Retreating totally from the surface-level awareness that forces him to think in terms of time and space, he feels for the bright glowing pinprick of the enemy hyperdrive.  Feels out the machinery surrounding it, bares his teeth in grim satisfaction.

He doesn't have the precision to just flip a switch or something, and he can't mess with their software.  What he can do, sensing the Force pulsing with all the promise of his Falling, is slide his consciousness into the crevices in the machinery and pull.

The initial meditation may have been easy, but this part is extremely difficult.  Outside of the range of possibility for most Jedi, and a lot more difficult for him just a few months ago.  His mental grasp slips and slides over the machinery, there’s no other word for it.  He needs to try something new.  He needs to…get angry, maybe.

Well, that’s never been difficult for him.

With the familiarity of habit, Anakin starts a tally.  One by one, he counts them off, Popper and Exec and the grizzled ace sharpshooters of Sawback Squad and the shinies he met in training review last week, three of them still nameless.  Good men, innocent men, their lives thrown away like so much trash.  And he knows what it’s like, to feel like offal for the machine, this damn sausage grinder of a universe that just crushes and crushes and crushes, like a boot on your neck, like—and these men don't deserve that!  His men who are good, brave, and real, and every day he has to send them out to be killed in their thousands and it makes him need to kill something, need to tear furrows through something that doesn't run on gears and oil, the injustice of it all, the scalding heat—and the Senate and the Council on their high fucking horses looking down on their soldiers crawling in the dirt, in the blood, on his men dying, and it sends him back to a day in the hot sun and his mother on the ground, in the shadow of the man with the glinting jewelry on his clenched fingers, and feeling the air crackle, cubic tons of invisible lighting and the atmosphere ablaze, and staring at the man with his eyes boiling in his head and praying, praying silent and frozen with all his might that the man would burst right then, would catch flame, would scream and whine and piss himself as he was crushed and boiled and torn asunder and every terrible thing—

—It jolts him back to awareness: A presence.  He feels her recoil as soon as she drops into his meditation well, signature lighting up with psychic pain as she’s scalded and disoriented by his storm of violent emotion.  What—Ahsoka!!

Shit, shit, fuck, fuck, fuck, he hurt Ahsoka!

His whole psyche thrums with panic, the heady taste of a pressure gradient forming as rage is displaced by fear.  The swirling sands churn even faster around him.  Thirty tons writhe serpentlike on the howling winds, higher and higher, blocking the sun, turning inward as the eye escapes him and he is plunged into the stinging semidarkness.  He’s hurt her, he’s hurting her, because of his pathetic lack of control, because he is pathetic—he is standing before the Council and they know what he’s worth, they know that he is trash, that he’s disgusting, and Obi-Wan should have killed him years ago, as soon as it became clear what he is, because he’ll poison her, he’s already poisoning her, he’s going to get her killed like all the rest—

No!   No, no, no, this is not—He grasps for a mantra, any mantra, to steady him.  There is no emotion, there is peace.  There is no ignorance, there is—there is—there is— serenity!   Fuck.  Fuck.  There is no passion, there is serenity.  Clearly not.  There is no chaos, there is— no, no, no, it’s not helping, it’s not helping—There is no death, there is only the Force.  There is no death— there is death all around him.  He is breathing it, he is choking on it, it coats his skin and clogs his pores.  Sometimes, it feels like the Force itself will crumple under the weight of the deaths it is bloated with.

He makes it through three more frantic repetitions of the Jedi Code but it's not helping, it's just tinging guilt with more and more red-tinted fear.  He can’t make himself believe it.  Because there is no peace!  When, in his life, has he ever known peace?!   There is no peace, peace is a lie—

Peace is a lie.

…

The full line floats up unbidden from the back of his memory: Peace is a lie, there is only Passion.

…

……

Through Passion, I gain Strength.

Through Strength, I gain Power.

The Sith Code isn't exactly a secret to the Jedi, but it’s been years since he last thought about it.

Through Power, I gain Victory.

Through Victory, my chains are broken.

The Force shall free me.

(Later, he will remember when he first learned it: fifteen and struggling through History of the Sith Wars.  He remembers it because it shook him, punched him somewhere deep, to hear those ideas in that context, and because of how the two padawans nearest to him glanced at him out of the corners of their eyes when it came to the last lines, subtly, like he wouldn't notice.  And he suddenly felt half the class' attention on him despite the sea of placid backs.  Radiating pity, and contempt, and wariness, and…curiosity.  So he sat rigid in his seat with his face completely blank and his shields tight for the rest of the class period, because leaving would be an admission of—an admission of—an admission.)

Through Power, I gain Victory.  Through Victory, my chains are broken.  But no, they discussed this in the diner—self-control can be a form of freedom.  True self-control is the ultimate freedom; technically, “autonomy” is a synonym for self-control!

Through Passion I gain Strength, through Strength I gain Power— but not just any passion.  He can feel Ahsoka’s presence dithering just outside his shields, a featherlight touch, uncertain of her approach.  He thinks back to his talk with Barriss: the right passion for the right moment.  Passionate rage, passionate pride, passionate affection—what Ahsoka needs from him, what he really needs right now, is—is affection, reassurance.

Anakin exhales one corporeal breath and forces himself, calling on all of his mangled training, to think only of Ahsoka.  Not his fear or guilt for her, not now; he can't afford to indulge himself now.  He thinks of what she means to him.  He thinks of a clever comeback that startled even Obi-Wan into an undignified snort, the heart-stopping sight of her sprinting across a minefield for the men under her command.  Remembers her crowing in unrestrained enthusiasm the first time she managed to knock him off his feet in training. She strutted down the halls like a smug peali-hen for the whole day after, and he kept catching himself smiling at odd moments.

The sand swirls to heaven, but it does not sting.  Anakin is burning with a different kind of fire.  He is here, he is solid, he has a job to do.  He has to give her a future, give all of them a future.  Mustering all of his affection, his pride, his determination, he wraps his attention around the machinery again and pulls— and one of the metal sheets he’s pulling at gives way.

Yes!

The excitement sends the storm higher.  That and Ahsoka, who's now poking at his consciousness cautiously but without a hint of blame or hurt peeping past her shields.  She’s strong, so much stronger than he ever was.  He’s not going to hurt her, he has to do this for her.  He would fight a thousand wars for Ahsoka and Padme and Obi-Wan and Rex, the least of them the one inside his head.

With half his attention, he does what he meant to do earlier: pulls her deeper into the Force, shows her what he’s doing.  Her signature reads surprise, then a hint of embarrassment, and then small hands join his on the cogs and levers, compounding his strength with a rush of peaceful affection.  The tension on the machinery increases exponentially.

Together, they push, and push, and push—

CRACK-CRACK—KABOOM!

Anakin and Ahsoka withdraw their awareness from the machinery as hyperdrive energy balloons outward into the space of the engine room, snapping and crackling and tasting vaguely of mint.  In the Force, master and padawan share a moment of giddy exhilaration, reveling in the relief of a hard job well done.  (Through Power, I gain Victory.)

And then Anakin is jerked out of meditation just in time to smash at immense speed into a wall.

/B/

Anakin blinks back into awareness to someone shaking him.  

He’s on the floor.  His mouth tastes tacky, and he has a splitting headache, though not, he’s pretty sure, a head injury-type headache.  He’s overextended himself in the Force.  That’s Rex kneeling over him, helmet on.  All around him are red flashing lights and a confused garble of noises: Clones, shouting over each other and running in seemingly every direction at once.

“...Rex?”  He goes to push himself up and almost crumples when he puts his weight on his left arm.  Dislocated shoulder, almost certainly.  The pain clears the last of his confusion, and he manages to focus his eyes on the man in front of him.  “What happened?”

Rex is grim in the Force, and—scared.  Anakin has only rarely felt that from Rex.  He speaks very fast.  “Enemy’s hyperdrive cut out, as planned.  We rammed them before they could drop entirely out of hyperspace, they pulled us out with them.  Most of the men were strapped in, few casualties.”

“What’s the issue?”

“We dropped out directly into Gamorr’s gravity well.”

…Ah.

Anakin levers himself to a sitting position with his right arm, his left dangling uselessly beside him.  His head swims.  “What are our chances of getting out.”

“None.”

None?!  Focus.  “Time to impact?”

“T-minus fifteen, give or take.”

“The men?”

“Already strapped into impact harnesses, most of them.  Other than a few squads I’m sending out in our small craft, the rest of them have orders to do the same.”

Anakin surges to his feet.  “Is that Kaminoan policy?”  The familiar smoldering rage resurges to push the fear back, though it does nothing for the dizziness.  “Scratch those orders, they're safer in escape pods!”

“Sir?”

“Damn cloners were cost-cutting.”  This close, Anakin can see Rex’s eyes widen behind the visor, and he abruptly dashes off to start shouting their new orders into the ship’s PA system.  In his absence, Anakin wavers on his feet, and Fives smoothly appears at his elbow.  He shakes him off, pushing himself into a fast walk toward the port bridge exit as Fives follows.  The red flashing lights and running clones do not let up as they head into the chrome hallway; one member of command staff almost shoulder-checks Anakin into a wall, clutching a datapad to his chest.  “Where’s Ahsoka?” Anakin picks up where he left off, keeping the frisson of fresh fear out of his voice with effort.

“Winded, not badly hurt.  Strapped her in myself, in the commissary.  We heading for the escape pods?”

Anakin grunts, grips his left arm to stabilize it as he breaks into a jog.  “No.  I need you and Rex getting as many brothers into them as possible, but this ship wasn't built for our numbers—212th and half the 501st.  Not all of us are going to get in, Rex knows that.  I’m going to see if something creative can be done with the engines.”

It’s a testament to the understanding he’s built with his men that Fives makes no further attempt to get him to evacuate.  He’s silent for a moment in a way that suggests listening to helmet comms, then reports, “General Kenobi was in medical when we crashed.  Now getting the wounded into a pod.”

“Great.”  Anakin breathes out deliberately, slow and controlled.  “Thank you for the info.  I need you back with Rex now.”

“Yessir.”  Fives turns and books it back up the corridor, not even bothering with a half-assed salute.

The commissary is filled with silent brothers, strapped into the impact absorption seats that have folded out from floors and walls in all the residential areas.  This is the area furthest from any of the escape pods; Rex must have decided this group would stay aboard for logistical reasons.  Anakin doesn't envy him the decision.  A pop of orange in a sea of blue and white: Ahsoka, looking bruised but mostly alright.  She's trapped between Echo and Hulk, but she stills spies him as he passes the door and calls out: “Hey!  Skyguy!”  He senses more than sees her start to unclip her harness and backtracks to the doorway.

“Snips, get to an—”  Shit, he wants her to get to an escape pod, but at this point her trying to make it there in the crush might be more risky, and she'd never agree to leave her men behind anyway.  There’s no time to argue.  “Stay here, I’ll be back!”

“I'll help you—”  Echo is trying to grab her now, speaking in low tones.

“No!”  Anakin casts around for an excuse.  “Ahsoka, I need you here, okay?  I need you to help everyone keep calm, and try to keep any debris under control when we impact.  Can you do that for me?”

“I—yessir.”

He doesn't have time to acknowledge her response.  Anakin breaks into a run down the hallway again.

Via Force-assisted sprinting, he arrives in the engine room with eight minutes remaining before impact and immediately shoos out all of the stubborn engineers except Specialist Cheska, the stubbornest of the bunch.  He’s halfway caught his breath and is midway through explaining his plan to reroute power from the hyperdrive to the forward thrusters when they hit atmosphere, and both of them are thrown off their feet.

“Sir?  It’s about to get real hot in here, you need to leave!”

Anakin shakes his head.  “We leave together at T-minus two.”  Then he relocates his shoulder against a wall.

This section of the engine room is on an exterior wall; they’re forced to shout over the rush of air as well as Rex on the PA and the deafening creaking of metal as they scramble around the room, rerouting wires and strategically breaking coolant systems with jury-rigged code.  The temperature rises steadily until he’s relying almost entirely on his mechanical hand, the other slick with sweat and painful to move besides.  This is purely a power change, so luckily, they can make it without having to venture far into the other two or miles of engine rooms.  Even so, they barely finish in time.

“Escape pods, launch!  All hands, assume impact positions!  Go!  Go! ” Rex’s voice barks over the noise of things breaking.  The hull is definitely on fire by now, and the temperature is well over 320 Kelvin.  Anakin grabs Cheska with the Force and pulls him into a stumbling run behind him, out of the engine rooms.

There are two impact seats saved in the nearest barracks, mostly full of engineers.  Anakin and Cheska strap in with hands shaking from the adrenaline, puffing out overheated air.  The stabilizer bags around their heads, necks, and shoulders inflate with some panicked guidance from their similarly immobilized seatmates.  And then they wait.

(At his side, Anakin’s wrist comm blinks: incoming call from General Kenobi.  Squished in the stabilizer bag, he never notices.)

Thirty-four seconds later, the impact is strong enough to rattle their teeth in their heads.  Lucky that no one is awake to feel it.

Chapter Text

Aside from the crackle of fire and the drip, drip, drip of ruptured tanks and pipes, all is silent on the Dominator for approximately two minutes.

See, while the head-and-neck compression system in the impact seats is enough to keep the head from snapping forward too violently on the neck, it does little to keep the brain from snapping forward in the head.  A huge ship’s air-to-ground collision may look slow from a distance, but that’s a scale illusion; it is very fast from the point of view of a small body within that ship.  Even with Anakin’s power modifications, even with Cheska and Hutch’s inspired idea of using the laser cannons to supplement the downward thrust of the forward engines, there’s only so much that can be done to slow that enormous weight’s momentum.  Voila: instant mass concussion.

If not for those last-minute ideas and modifications, casualties likely would have been around 50 percent.  As it is, Fives’ voice reads out the growing list of casualties from Anakin’s wrist comm while he bends warped metal walls with the Force, choking on smoke and the nausea from his migraine as rescue teams shimmy through the gaps he makes.  Three chambers collapsed like an accordion near the nose of the ship: 30 dead, 7 injured.  Hull breaches sent fires raging through the bridge, four server rooms, and one section of the barracks: 14 dead, 54 injured.  (8 of them suffocated, not burned.)  Fire in engine block D3, spreading down adjacent hallways: 4 dead, 2 injured.  Preexisting head trauma exacerbated by the concussion on impact: 16 dead, 7 nonresponsive.  2 drowned in their sleep when the coolant ruptured.  An estimated 58 still unaccounted for.  57.  56.

At least it was an upright crash, Anakin tells himself.  At least there’s that.

He works through the Gamorrean night, sharing grim glances with Ahsoka when they team up to lift something heavy, until the Force exhaustion takes him to his knees.  Then one of the rookie medics spares half a second to threaten him with a hypo the injured desperately need, so he sits on a rock for an hour shouting orders and taking small sips from the water that they’ll have to ration heavily.

When Gamorr’s sun finally rises at 1500 standard, they have their numbers.  Of the approximately 1,700 men of the 501st, 625 were on the Dominator when she jumped to lightspeed—all of Carnivore battalion, Torrent, and some other specialty companies—along with 110 men of the 212th.  57 managed to evacuate in small craft before the crash, 56 of them landing safely in the hours after and joining in with the rescue efforts.  Rex and Fives estimate that about 250 men made it out in escape pods; 86 of those, two pods’ worth of survivors, stumble back to the wreck before dawn as well, bringing one casualty with them and leaving four pods unaccounted for.  Ultimately, that leaves them with 379 relatively healthy men, 91 injured, 96 dead, and 169 unaccounted for.

They cobble together a camp and collapse in shifts as the Dominator is stripped of every usable resource and accessible corpse.  The ship herself is a corpse now, too, looming over their shabby tents like a great, beached whale.  The shade is welcome; they've landed in what was luckily a huge clear area even before the Dominator’s lasers and thrusters scorched the earth, but the climate is almost arid enough to make the dark forested fringes obscuring the horizon look inviting.  Ash drifts through the air even now, causing hacking coughs to ring out frequently across the clearing and painting tan canvas tents with sooty fingerprints.

By the dawning of planetary day on the second 12-hour stretch since their crash, the Dominator is thoroughly gutted.  Her water and food rations have been distributed among the men as much as possible, with the remainder stored in huge plastic waterskins or blankets and hitched to poles to be carried the same way the wounded will be if they have to break camp.  The camp itself is ready to be disassembled at a moment’s notice.  Not that they're expecting trouble from the Separatists; with Grievous’ fleet decimated, the nearest appreciable Separatist force should be four thousand parsecs away, and there's no way intelligence of their crash and its location got to the Seps fast enough for them to beat allies to Gamorr.  No, the anticipated danger comes from Gamorr itself.  It has a reputation as an unpleasant and deeply hostile planet, with harsh terrain and warlike, xenophobic locals, so xenophobic in fact that very little is known about the planet that can’t be gathered from orbit.  The good news is, their crash site is two days' journey from the nearest major city, so a large force would have to actually seek them out and travel for some time to drive them off.  They should be gone by the time that becomes a problem; the camp's mobility is just Obi-Wan taking precautions.

The camp itself is Obi-Wan and Cody’s brainchild, organized down to the last strategic detail while Anakin and Rex were leading the rescue and scavenging efforts.  Obi-Wan, as High General, is technically in command of this whole operation despite the vast majority of the men being 501st, a fact Anakin might have resented if it didn't free him up to participate in the grunt work of search and rescue.  Despite coordinating their efforts extensively over comms (burying that missed call notification before Anakin could think much of it), Anakin’s barely seen Obi-Wan in person since the crash, and then it was all business, with no time or energy left for awkward non-communication.  Now, he jogs to the central command tent to join the full command stratum for a discussion of next steps, half-listening to the way the soft, ever-present chatter of clones is distorted by the wind in his ears.  Each step kicks up a small puff of ash.

/B/

Obi-Wan and Rex are already there when he pushes back the ragged entrance flap, looking sleepless and dirty.  Obi-Wan barely looks up, idly picking at the cast on his arm, while Rex nods and offers a tired, thin smile.  Neither of them seems much for talking.  After a moment of hesitation, Anakin settles cross-legged on the dirt floor, watching Obi-Wan out of the corner of his eye.  Obi-Wan stares out through the flap in the canvas.

Three minutes later, Ahsoka shows up, with Cody right behind her.  Anakin drags himself to his feet, huffing as his legs remind him how dirt-tired he is.  He feels like he’s made of rubber.  Still, he widens his stance, preparing himself for a long meeting.  Ahsoka returns his smile, though it barely reaches her eyes.

“Generals,” Cody greets them.  “Commander.  Captain.  Any new word from Coruscant?”

Obi-Wan returns his nod.  “Our current timetable is holding.  Plo Koon will be en route soon; the 214th began taking over his engagement on Bimmisaari two hours ago, so he should arrive in the next two standard days.  That's about 1.8 planetary days, if records serve.”

They're professionals, so none of them allow themselves a sigh of relief at the words, but it's close.  “So we’re holding our position?” Rex clarifies.

“Yes, it seems wiser to entrench at this point.”

Anakin frowns.  “I agree, but I’d like to take an expedition to secure access to a clean water source.  Scout pilots report a river a couple miles east, but they weren't able to test for contaminants.”

Obi-Wan nods, but—still isn't meeting his eyes.  “Yes, I suppose that's fine.”

(Anger stirs in Anakin’s gut.  He really is the perfect fucking Jedi, isn't he?  His failure of an apprentice solves one damn problem with a little extra juice from the wrong hydro tank, and now Obi-Wan won't even look at him.)

Ahsoka’s shoulders are tensing next to him.  Anakin shoves the feeling down.  “Copy that.  Rex,” he says evenly, breathing through the heat in his chest, “what do you think, do we need a full squadron?”

Rex considers, drumming his fingers on the helmet at his side.  “I would say half that, sir,” he concludes, “ten good men.  Enough to be prepared for trouble, but not enough to strain our resources.”

“Yes, about that,” Obi-Wan cuts in abruptly, “I noticed the water rationing scheme you set was quite harsh, given we have more than four days’ worth on a normal distribution scheme.  I authorized the medics to give more to the injured, but the whole battalion is still recovering.  Is such stringency really necessary?”

The pit in Anakin’s stomach ignites; the man could at least have the decency to look him in the fucking eyes if he’s going to humiliate him!  “Yes, General, it is necessary,” he grits out.  “Until I see Plo Koon’s landers with my own eyes, I am gonna keep us on track for at least a week of water.  That's what the damn river is for: If we secure reliable access to clean drinking water, then we can relax the rationing, but there's no guarantee it’s gonna be drinkable.  The 501st will be fine.  They know how to make it stretch.”

 Obi-Wan is silent for a long moment.  Then: “I suppose you’d better set out immediately, then.”

“I suppose I should,” Anakin says through gritted teeth.  He knows a dismissal when he hears one.  “Ahsoka, take notes, comm me if anyone has anything else useful to say.  I’m going to go keep the damn kreat-kith off our backs.”  He storms out into the bright morning sunlight, leaving the flap swinging.

/B/

He makes it halfway to the Torrent section of their makeshift barracks before he realizes literally no one in that room would have understood the poorly translated idiom—the water thieves, kreat-kith, being one of the many ways on Tatooine to express the dangers of evaporation—and his face colors.  It doesn't fucking matter, they can figure it out from context.

Jesse, chatting with Echo toward the front of the tent, calls out a cheerful greeting when he enters the barracks, and he reins in his anger for the second time today.  “I need ten men to head out and secure a water source,” he calls, projecting to reach the fifty or so men beneath the stitched-together canvas.  “Four and a half miles each way, and if it's clean we’ll be carrying as much as we can back, but you'll also be able to drink your fill.  Volunteers?”

Jesse and Echo are in, no surprise there.  They get eight more volunteers soon enough, all of them familiar after two years of fighting with Torrent as his main strike force.  They exchange greetings, then break to gather supplies.  Ten minutes later, the group is assembled again at the eastern edge of camp, eager to get moving before the sun climbs another handspan above the western horizon.  They’ve lined the empty backpacks they all wear with plastic bags, enough to carry two gallons each once they’ve refilled the canteens on their hips.  In addition, two empty plastic waterskins, holding 18 gallons each at capacity, are folded up and lashed to packs along with the long, lightweight poles that will be used to carry them.  Jag pokes cheerily at Holo for the layer of ash on his face, as if he’s much better, and Jesse and Echo appear to be trying to trip each other.  The familiarity of it all should not be this calming.

Anakin takes a deep breath and lets the last dregs of his anger subside.  Time to head out, he judges.

At the last minute, as they’re taking their first steps out of camp and into less scorched regions, Ahsoka jogs up to meet them, sounding slightly winded.  “Wait up!  I’ll come with you!”

“The meeting already ended?” Anakin asks.  That’s surprising.  He hooks his thumbs into the straps on his pack as she catches her breath.

“Yeah, nothing else really important happened.  Uh, Rex reported in on our fuel supplies—small craft are grounded for the time being, ground-scouting only—and said morale is decent, given the circumstances.  You already know the food situation.  Cody said eight more men were cleared to leave medical since this morning, including Hevy—I saw him, gave him a punch on the shoulder from us both.  Lost two more men as well.  And we’re out of bacta.”  She says this breezily, and Anakin forces himself not to react, to allow her this facade of quartz-hard brightness.  “After that, Cody and Obi-Wan started making, like, eighty-six contingency plans, and Rex said I didn't have to stay for that, so I came here.”

Anakin smiles; he hasn’t had time to really talk with Ahsoka since the crash.  “Well, if we do end up filling these things before heading back, we’ll be glad of the help.  You have a full canteen?  Ration bar?  Sun protection?”

“Yes and yes.”  She tugs the shawl draped around her shoulders up over her montrals, grimacing at the scratchy texture and shooting him a dirty look when he can't help a teasing smirk.  “Any other obvious questions for me, or are we heading out?”

“Commander, your inner teenager is showing!” Jesse laughs as they begin walking again at Anakin’s hand sign.  He jostles her with an elbow, and she lurches away, scowling.

“I’m an outer teenager too!  It’s allowed!”

“Yeah, Jesse, what’s your excuse?” one of the guys in the front calls back, and Anakin joins in with the laughter at his indignant gasp.

The journey continues in this vein for the first two miles or so, the men spreading out as much to make talking easier as to keep from leaving an obvious trail.  It’s nice to have something to do that feels productive, directed, without the urgency and grief of search and rescue.  They set an easy pace, keeping an eye on the horizon and stopping several times to gather plants or insects for analysis, so the sun beats down from higher and higher overhead as they walk.  Eventually Anakin, too, is forced to flip up his hood, and most of the men don their buckets.  Around them, the landscape is a dry beige and brown, and very flat; frequently, they step over low, scrubbly bushes with tear-shaped leaves or stubby needles sharp enough to draw blood.  Often, Anakin hears a sort of rustling, like small animals scurrying for cover, but he can never spot the source.  It’s not a true desert like Tatooine or a cracked-earth desert like the primary theater on Geonosis; it’s something like a cousin to those ecosystems, with dry air but, Anakin suspects, abundant groundwater.  He’s interested in seeing what kind of forest was growing along the horizon on the other side of camp.  All they can see on the horizon in this direction are low, reddish mountains with storm clouds clotting the skies above them.

By the third mile, most chatter has ceased; the still air is filled only with heavy breathing and the occasional good-humored remark.  Anakin takes a tiny sip from his canteen and swishes it around his mouth before letting it slide ever-so-slowly down his throat.  The feeling of it is incredible.  And they should be coming up on the canyon soon—if the water is good, and he has a hunch it will be, he’ll be able to guzzle as much as he wants within the hour.

It’s startling the way the canyon drops out below them: One minute, all there is ahead of them is flat dirt and rocks, and then a moment later they’re yards from the edge of a vertical dropoff, facing a striated canyon sixty feet deep at the bottom and a quarter of a mile wide.  The elevation is lower on the opposite side, allowing for the illusion of an unbroken landscape until you get very close.  Luckily, the initial dropoff on their side is only seven or eight feet, and then the canyon cuts down from there to its depths in a manageably shallow V, with the occasional jutting boulder or steeper drop where they’ll have to scramble.  At the bottom, there is the river: a solid five Aethersprites’ wingspans across, slightly muddy-looking and just barely audible.

The delighted chatter picks back up as they hike their way down to the water’s edge, a few of the guys dislodging clouds of dried-up silt and pebbles in their haste.  The river must fill up the whole canyon in the rainy season, Anakin reflects.  The silt only clings where the grade is shallowest, though, exposing the ruddy streaks and layers running through the rock beneath it.

On both sides, the canyon runs straight for awhile before curving back away from the direction of their camp, blocking their view.  As soon as they reach the bottom, Anakin sends four of the men up to scout beyond both bends.  The rest of them fan out to seek patches of shade where they can find them, keeping half a wary eye on the ridges above, while Holo crouches on the water’s edge and pulls out the water testing kit from his backpack.  This process will take awhile; there's a lot of things to be tested for on an unfamiliar planet.  In the meantime, Anakin drifts over to Ahsoka, easing himself down beside her on a large, reddish rock neatly shaded by an outcropping above it.  Stars, his feet are sore.  “You doing alright, Padawan?”

“Yeah,” she says immediately.  When Anakin doesn't respond, just projects calm energy into the space between them, she sighs.  “Pepper died in the crash.  I was playing sabacc with him in the mess hall just last week.  He owed me twenty credits!” she tacks on indignantly, but her heart isn't in it.

Anakin hesitates for a moment, then slings an arm around her shoulder, hindbrain rippling with the sense-memory of his mother and a biting night wind.  Warm hands, rattling shutters.  He pulls her close.  “I’m sorry, Snips.  He sounds like a good guy.”

She nods, montrals rubbing against his shoulder.  “He was.  I didn't know him that well, but I think we could've been good friends.  He was a shiny, still.  Same batch as Clinch and 7822.”

Anakin doesn't know how to respond, so he just rubs his thumb lightly over her upper arm.  Up and down.  Up and down.  They are silent, for a while.

When she speaks up again, it’s quieter.  “Is it horrible that I’m glad it was Execute, not Carnivore, on the Resolute when it got rammed?  I know a lot more of the guys in Carnivore, but the members of Execute deserved to live as much as anyone.  I feel awful that I’m thinking about them like that.”

A hot wind whistles through the canyon; the rock digs into his legs.  Anakin takes his time, considering his words before he answers.  “There’s nothing wrong with being glad your friends survived, Ahsoka.  No one in Execute would hold that against you.”  He pauses, lets her digest that.  “And you're holding up really well, with all of this.  I’m proud of you for how well you're handling it.”

She sniffs.  “Well, it’s easy when you have something to do.  And I’m really glad Hevy is in the clear, that helps.”

“It does, doesn't it.  And the extra leeway on water will be great for the medbay.  If we manage to fill all our skins, we’ll be able to lift their rationing entirely.  I bet we’ll get more full recoveries after that.”

“Yep!  We’ll be in the clear.”  Ahsoka grins brightly, shaking off her melancholy all at once like a bad dream.  “Okay, enough resting!  I’m gonna go bug Holo until he finishes the water tests or shoots me, whichever comes first.”

Anakin leans back on his hands as she stands and brushes herself off, letting his eyes close just for a moment.  Younglings are resilient, he remembers reading in the holonet parenting books he tore through in a panic when Ahsoka first became his padawan.  Back when they first got a moment’s respite, and he realized he had no idea what to do with this little slip of a thing who had been put in his care.  Younglings are resilient, he remembers, and yet at the same time he remembers metal glinting in moonlight, and the shame of the sun on half-healed gashes.  He remembers the empty-eyed girls in the marketplace, and how his mother would cover his eyes as they passed because they made no attempt to cover themselves.  And he knows that he is not a good person, and he knows that there are reasons for this.  So he watches Ahsoka’s narrow back as she jogs away, and he thinks with a feeling like a final stand that younglings are resilient, but they are not elastic.

/B/

They trudge back into camp as the sun sets that evening in high spirits despite the heavy weights they carry.  All of them are laden with full, dripping packs, one of the big waterskins slung on its stretcher poles between Anakin and an old veteran named Cantrip and another between Echo and one of the shinies.  The moisture from when Anakin gave in and let them all splash into the water, whooping at the coolness of it, is long since dry, but the evidence remains in the thin layer of silt coating the troopers’ blacks and the stiff way Anakin’s hair clings to his forehead and neck.  Their canteens filter the water for them, which Anakin thinks is the best damn invention since the hyperdrive and he’s not afraid to say it.  They’re tired and achy, but energized by their success and wonderfully hydrated.

It takes about a half hour to get the water consolidated and the bulk of it stored in a cool, accessible place.  The medics immediately put their share to use.  By then, the sun is setting in the planet’s east, the cloudless sky turning dusky, then an inky black above them.  Ahsoka jogs off to pester Hevy again, while Anakin eyes the command tent, steels himself, and thinks, Enough is enough.

As expected, Obi-Wan is inside when he pushes past the flap, lurking in the dark and brooding over a holomap projected up from an emitter in the middle of the dirt floor.  He straightens out of his crouch when Anakin comes in, something cautious in his eyes that Anakin can be gracious enough to ignore.   As a peace offering, he offers his former master a full canteen with his organic hand.  Well, more like shoves it into his chest.  Obi-Wan blinks and takes it from him.  “Good news, old man: The water’s clean.  I adjusted the rationing.  Drink what you want.  Then we need to talk.”

Obi-Wan slowly unscrews the lid and sips primly from the canteen’s rim, all the while looking at Anakin like he’s a crazy person and not someone he’s known for a full twelve years now.  He swishes the water around in his mouth, lets it trickle down his throat, and it warms something small, tucked away in Anakin’s chest, that he didn't forget that; that he listened, and remembers what Anakin taught him.  His next words dampen the warmth as quickly as it flared.  “I believe we’ve said everything there is to be said on the matter.”

“I—what?  Obi-Wan, come on.  I get that you disagreed with how I did it, but it was Krell.  Are you really going to let him get between us like this?”  He hesitates, but then barrels on when it looks like Obi-Wan’s about to interject that yes, he is, as a matter of fact—Anakin won't be able to say what he needs to if he gets angry.  Use your Passion wisely.  “And I didn't explain what I meant when I said I was leaving.”

This stops Obi-Wan short, lips twitching beneath his slightly overgrown beard.  “I thought it was rather clear what you meant.”

This catches Anakin off guard.  “Well—yeah, I guess.  I’m planning on leaving the Order.  I think it’s…pretty clear, at this point, that I don't belong there.  What with the, you know.”  He taps sheepishly at his temple, hoping to get a wry smile from Obi-Wan, but Obi-Wan barely meets his eyes before looking away like it burned him.  Anakin isn't wearing his sunglasses, and from that reaction, he realizes his eyes must be yellow right now.

The look on Obi-Wan’s face makes him feel small, mean.  Shriveled.  All of a sudden he can't have this conversation.  “...Sorry about your investment, I guess.  Hope they don't kick you off the Council when I wash out.  Good talk.”  He turns to leave, feeling the water slosh uneasily in his stomach.

A hand grasps his arm.  “No—wait.”  Obi-Wan looks tired; are his hands shaking?  “Anakin, say what you meant to say.  Please.”

The curdled feeling in Anakin’s chest is replaced by shock.  He’s not sure he’s ever heard Obi-Wan sound like that before.  He sounds…old.  He looks old, in the dimness of the tent, lit blue on his left side by the holomap, his eyes gleaming out of cavernous shadows.

Anakin takes a breath.

“I—yeah, I was going to say, just because I can’t be a Jedi anymore doesn't mean I never want to…you know, see you again.  I’ll be on Coruscant.  We can keep in touch.”  He licks his lips, eyes glued firmly to the floor, feeling abruptly absurd: like some great, clumsy thing, too big for his body.  He forges ahead, speaking faster.  “I’m not exactly planning to reveal the whole Fallen thing.  I’m definitely gonna stay in Ahsoka’s life, no question, and…I mean, it would just be weird if we didn't stay in contact.  You have non-Jedi friends.  Plenty of Jedi have non-Jedi friends.  It's not like it would be the end of everything.”

His final words ring in the air for a long moment after he finishes.  He subtly fists his mechanical hand in his robes, waiting for Obi-Wan’s response.  In retrospect, he thinks he communicated that pretty well.  Remarkably well, actually; very calm, sincere, and commonsense for him.

…So then why is Obi-Wan still looking at him like he’s announced his intention to lead a live nerf into the communal meditation chambers?

Obi-Wan licks his lips.  “You’re just…retiring.”

Anakin blinks.  “Yes, essentially.”

“Peacefully.”

“Uh, well, I’m thinking about taking up some security work, maybe piloting?  But yeah, I guess.”  He’ll get bored if he spends all his time as Padme’s trophy husband.

Obi-Wan just stares at him, like this doesn't compute.  “Anakin, you Fell to the Dark Side.”

“Yeah?  Yes.”

“You’re practically on the path to becoming a Sith Lord.”

He is definitely on the path to becoming a Sith Lord.  “Not necessarily?” he offers weakly.

“And yet you're planning to just…retire?”

Anakin thinks for a moment.  “Yes.  Um.  What else would I do?”  Well, he’ll almost certainly get involved with the cleanup on Zygerria.  Or Ryloth.  A lot of places need cleanup, right now.  But it’s not like Obi-Wan disapproves very strongly of bisecting slavers when the Order’s reputation isn't on the line.

Obi-Wan stares for a moment longer, then suddenly releases his breath and runs a hand through his grimy hair.  “I need to think about this.”  He turns away, eyes immediately glued back on the holomap in the middle of the tent.

He needs to…?

Now it’s Anakin’s turn to just stare at him for a moment, almost more confused than angry, at this point.  Scratch that, he’s extremely frustrated.  He’s about to say something, to make Obi-Wan listen to him, when a burst of alarm—of absolute horror— zings through the Force from the east.

/B/

Like one organism, Obi-Wan and Anakin turn and sprint for the tent flap.  The Force signatures of the clones around them sharpen to alertness as they burst out into the center of camp, and the quiet murmuring of men on helmet comms gets louder.  A clone—wings on the helmet, signature smelling of cinnamon, Anakin doesn't know his name—sprints out from behind the main medical tent and makes a beeline for them, breathing hard.  “General!  Generals!  Fleet—on the horizon—”

Anakin blinks; rescue, already?  Plo Koon should still be at least a day out.

“—the Seps, they found us!   Flying Dooku’s insignia—!”  He points to the east, in the direction of the unremarkable sunset.

Anakin’s heart drops to his stomach.

The horror of it rolls across the camp like a wave as the sharp nose of the first destroyer edges over the horizon line, then another.  And another.  The setting sun glints off their underbellies, flinging their menace forward across the desolate, exposed landscape.

They’re besieged.

Chapter Text

They march.

Breaking camp was the work of thirty minutes, due to how well they’d prepared as well as the discipline and communication network of the clones.  Before the first landers had been spotted descending from the star destroyers hovering just past the horizon, they were already breaking for the densely forested edge of the clearing.  It would afford them cover in the short term, delaying if not preventing the discovery of their ploy.

See, usually their own navy would be protecting them from above, preventing the enemy from just bombing them into oblivion from high altitude without even attempting to make contact planetside.  They have no such defenses here, won’t for at least two standard days.  Nor do they have any heavy ground-to-air artillery.  Until they can get to a sentient settlement with large-scale shielding, their only hope is keeping their enemy from fixing on their position.  This is not a battle; this is a game of cat-and-mouse.

Or cat and mice, really.  Because that’s the ploy: split their forces into individual squads and spread them throughout the area.  It was suggested in a strained whisper by Knight Kallist in the first hour of their forced march through the dense, thorny forest.  Barely recovered enough to walk after the severe concussion and internal bruising that incapacitated her after the crash, she grits her teeth and jogs beside them regardless, because that is what Jedi do when one more injured soldier means two more exhausted clones hauling a stretcher across klicks upon klicks of untracked woodland.  Her padawan jogs among the injured, deliberately radiating calm through the Force while carrying the youngling they brought with them from Arami on their back.

So, swiftly they go, and silently, in three groups following parallel routes but separated by a klick on each side.  The forest fills with the soft layered sounds of labored breathing and sticks cracking under boots as the deep shadows of the canopy slip across white helmets and broad shoulders.  All of the Jedi wear ear comms, without the bulky mouthpieces that would allow them to speak into the vod’s channel, but the general channel is utterly silent.  Anakin and Obi-Wan heft a huge bin of rations between them, lashed to a pole; at Anakin’s side, Ahsoka ghosts over fallen logs under the burden of a backpack practically bigger than she is.  The bar digs into the dip where Anakin’s neck meets shoulder, unprotected by the pauldron, and his headache throbs with every jolting step over the rough terrain.

Four hours into the march, the bombardment starts.  The first blast hits a ridge two klicks away, an explosion of dirt just visible through a thin spot in the trees and across a wide, shallow valley.  He raises an arm with a hand signal, ordering the troops to divert left to stay in the thicker trees, and then makes surprised eye contact with Obi-Wan, who has his hand raised in the exact same signal.  Cody and Rex look at each other, Cody nods, and Rex relays it on to the troops over comms.

The next blast is closer, nearly catching the edge of their right wing.  Men jump, scatter away from it, and Rex snaps into the general comm in a whisper, reminding them of the importance of remaining as silent as possible.  Anakin grits his teeth and, the next time he can see through a gap in the trees, musters himself for an enormous push in the Force, shaking the trees two klicks back and far to the south of the way they came. His headache immediately intensifies, to the point where he must either visibly wince or leak some of it into the Force, since Obi-Wan shoots him a worried look.  Two minutes later, he hears the concussive blast and knows a missile has hit that spot.

The blasts are sporadic, two to three bombs dropping every thirty minutes or so, most of them only heard from far away.  Without access to the planetary infrastructure to amplify their comm range, they can't contact the other two groups of around 160 men each, and have no way of knowing if they've been discovered or hit.  For the fifteenth time, Anakin wonders if they should have split the highest level of the command class between the groups, to make sure all three would have the most effective leadership possible in case of big decisions, and to ensure that someone was left to take full command if this group was the one discovered.  But no, Scruggs and Walton are experienced commanders who’ve managed forces much larger than 160 in their time.  And Obi-Wan was right to keep Anakin, Rex, and Ahsoka with the group incorporating both 501st soldiers and the troops of the 212th; Obi-Wan could lead 501st men in an ordinary situation, but in a high-stakes operation requiring instant responsiveness in complete silence, the troops’ familiarity with their commanders could be the difference between life and death.  

They just have to make sure this group isn't hit.

Six hours into the march, they encounter the first of the four escape pods still unaccounted for.  Forty men fold into their ranks, all relatively healthy and extremely confused.  They didn't see Dooku’s forces when they arrived; it's sheer luck that they happened to be under cover in the forest when the bombing started.  Their friends press ration bars into their hands, to eat on the run, and catch them up in whispers over comms.

Eight hours into the march, planetary sunset occurs.  Their pace slows as night falls; exhausted as they are, the men become more alert, squinting out into the black spaces between tree trunks that their night vision washes in green.  Their wariness and dread, sharp and acidic, roll out like a fog despite each individual’s efforts to keep them tightly contained, oozing a sort of psychic snail trail that follows them through the darkness.  This planet has no moons, so it is wickedly dark; in the end, all of the Jedi must borrow helmets from the wounded except for Kallist, whose canine eyesight goes beyond the Force-enhanced senses of the others, and Ahsoka, who stumbles grimly up hills and over logs with a handful of Anakin’s robe or Obi-Wan’s because no standard helmet will fit over her montrals.  Togruta are predators too, just like Bothans, but they're adapted for a planet with six moons, and adult Togruta supplement eyesight with their montrals in ways Ahsoka has never had time to learn.  Her own night-vision goggles were lost in the crash.  Anakin can taste her acrid fear in the back of his throat and wishes he could carry her, guilt for so many things settling into his stomach like a familiar, too-heavy lunch, but he knows he can't afford to tire himself out that way.  They still have a long ways to go.

The good news, however, is that the intervals between bombings widen, and they sound increasingly far off target.  After around two hours of this, Anakin passes on the order that they can slow their march and implement a caterpillar break: the force narrows into a long, thin column, and every five minutes the frontmost men peel off to the sides and stop for a rest, rejoining the line five minutes later when the backmost members pass them by.  Everyone takes out one ration bar from his pack and drinks sparingly from his canteen, though they’ve been staying as hydrated as they can manage throughout the march.  Anakin’s men, trained for desert survival more than any other environment just because that's what their general knows, should have about half finished their first canteen’s worth if they’ve rationed correctly.  He hopes Obi-Wan’s men have been similarly cautious.

Once, during the night, the forest comes to an end, and they have to sprint across a field about two miles across.  They were expecting this, the first of two unavoidable breaks from cover along the route they designed based on their small craft’s scouting, but that doesn't exactly make it easier to confront.  Just before reaching it, they stop for their first real rest, fifteen minutes to freshen them up as much as possible for the run.  Then they line up at the edge of the forest, thinning their line to a long horizontal only four men deep, to minimize the total time spent out in the open.  For this, Anakin does pass his side of Obi-Wan’s supplies pole to one of the lieutenants, shed his bulky helmet, and whisper for Ahsoka to climb on his shoulders.  She bites her lip and hesitates but complies without arguing, which does more than anything, even their bond, to tell him how tired she is.

Anakin gives the signal; Rex passes it on.  Then they’re sprinting as fast as they can across the flat terrain, which is not nearly as fast as it was it would have been twelve hours ago, while long alien grasses and delicate wildflowers brush past them up to their hips and the concealed roots do their best to send them sprawling.  They succeed more than once, quiet curses quickly stifled all around him.  Even with the aid of the Force, Anakin almost falls twice, Ahsoka’s thin fingers gripping tighter into his hair with each perilous shift of their combined weight.  Carrying her makes this far more difficult than it would have been, but at the same time, he thinks that without the unacceptable prospect of taking her down with him, he almost certainly would have fallen.

Those fifteen heart-stopping minutes are some of the longest of Anakin’s life.  The star-strewn sky opens up all around them, blessedly empty but, at the same time, pregnant with their terrible threat.  At every moment, Anakin expects to catch the flicker of stars being blotted out one by one by the passage of some dark craft high above; eventually, however, since there isn't much he could do even if he were to see it, he manages to stop giving in to the temptation to look up.  Mostly.  Head down, eyes forward, heart beating out of his chest, hyperaware of the weight on his shoulders; at one point, she grips his hair too tightly and he grunts in surprise, eliciting a whispered “Sorry!” and a quick release, her hands moving down to his temples, which is marginally better even as it obstructs his peripheral vision.

The trees enfold them on the other side like a blessing, the softest and kindest of mercies.  They take five minutes to catch their breath.  Anakin reluctantly lets his padawan down and takes up the poles of a stretcher; there’s a general spelling of those carrying the injured or other heavy burdens.  They march.

The long night passes without incident for their group, a mockery of all their caution.  Nineteen hours into their march, Gamorr’s first and more distant sun rises, painting the top leaves of this merciful forest with the dim yellow of a false dawn.

Eighteen hours into the march, they come across another escape pod.  The hatch is closed.  Anakin barely even has the capacity to feel the preemptive grief or desperate hope this situation would have evoked in him practically any other day of the war; hours ago, they all reached that point where exhaustion morphs into a spreading numbness that is no less terrible for all that it is less immediately painful.  It's hard to muster the passion to care for anything but survival.

They stop, regardless, to wrench open the hatch in the escape pod.  It’s as he suspected: the men inside are dead in their seats, cooked upon reentry.  Must’ve been a flaw in the heat shield.  Anakin, who convinced Rex to send men to the pods in place of the star destroyer’s internal collision system, discovers that he still retains the capacity for guilt.

Twenty-two hours in, this becomes, officially, the longest continuous march Anakin has ever participated in.  He registers this with a dim flicker of interest, quickly extinguished.  His feet have never hurt this much.  His blisters have blisters, and his socks are moist with blood.  His lower back is a hard, solid mass of agony; his shoulders throb.  He thinks he might cry if he ever gets to sleep again.  He has been in more pain than this, many times, but he has never been in so much of this kind of pain.

Obi-Wan looks pale; he has stopped using his bad arm.  Ahsoka doesn't realize she’s dropped her shielding, and her desperate tiredness suffuses their bond, a vast thundercloud intermittently set ablaze by lightning-fast flashes of her grim determination.  He draws strength from her strength, tries to push the same back to her, to Obi-Wan, when he remembers.

Knight Kallist’s padawan collapses.  She carries him.  Two more men, supporting each other wounded, collapse.  Their brothers carry them.  Anakin feels the moment of reluctance from the brothers as no one, including their batchmates, immediately volunteers to pick them up, and then the flash of shame that ripples through the ranks a moment later.  They are rolled into stretchers and lifted.  Anakin wishes, distantly, that he could have turned his mind away, in that moment, because they are only people, and they deserve their privacy, and he does not like to know it.  And he does not like to, truly, understand it.

Twenty-four hours in, three suns are high overhead, the bombardment has recommenced on some distant mountainside to the west, and it's amazing, how the torture of this march can always find some new way to refresh itself.  Anakin has known professional torturers less creative.

Twenty-six hours into the march, they come up over the top of their hundredth, thousandth ridge, and there it is: the city.

/B/

In the general comm channel, someone sobs, once; from relief or from pain, it's hard to tell.  Their mic is quickly muted.

The city stands on a great plateau across a modest valley, about half a mile away from them as the pisqua-bird flies.  It’s impossible to gauge its size from so far away, but it spreads wide across the plateau—or really, it would be fairer to call it a ridge of sorts with a wide patch in the middle.  The valley in front of them is like a shallow-ish oval bowl, and Anakin knows from the scouts is matched by a bowl of similar size on the other side; the city sits on the rim between them and thus connects to other level ground by a road on either side, perhaps four yards thick at its thinnest point.  It’s a beautifully defensible position, from the point of view of a small, barely armed force going up against a fresh army with aircraft and heavy artillery.  It’s also a terribly defensible position, from the point of view of a force about to attack it under exceedingly unfavorable conditions.

The city’s shields are engaged, a faint glimmering visible in the air, but that won't be a problem if they can just get close enough.  If they can overcome any defenses and take the city before Dooku's bombers find them, they can finally sleep in relative safety, at least for the few hours it will take Dooku to land ground troops nearby.  Force ascendant, Anakin just wants to sleep.

Theoretically, they have two choices: A rapid scramble across the valley and up the other side, or taking the long way around the rim of the valley, a detour of about an hour that would keep them under the cover of the trees until the last moment and prevent them from having to attack up a slope.

But these aren't really choices, because the clones may be the best soldiers anywhere, an opinion Anakin would defend with his fists to any puffed-up senatorial trash, but they're only people.  And as Obi-Wan very quietly warned him as soon as the first jolt of overwhelming emotion wore off, they have limits.  Faced with the prospect of resting in five minutes or resting in an hour, Anakin would rather not find out where their limits lie.

He looks around to make sure the lines are fairly even and sufficiently deep.  No adjustments are needed.  The men at the front are practically leaning forward in their eagerness, clutching their guns, and the Force is tinged with an intoxicating, hysterical energy that might actually be making him a little high, though maybe that's the lack of sleep.

Anakin raises one hand signal, then another.  He makes eye contact with Rex and Cody, and they both nod.

He thrusts his hand forward, chopping down, and sprints out into the open.

He’s joined in the first leap over the ridge by thirty men, the rest crowding on their heels like a hunting pack of massiffs.  They swarm down the slope in silence except for the thundering of their feet, though Anakin can feel the wild yell poised to hurl itself from the backs of a hundred throats.  The valley is lush with low, scrubby plants instead of the tall grasses of the night field, but a few men stumble anyways on protruding rocks or their own clumsy exhaustion.  Still, they pick themselves up and keep running, faster and faster as they reach halfway across the valley, as the first low-flying Separatist bomber bursts out over the trees behind them.

“Scatter!” Anakin and Obi-Wan roar in concert, and their tight ranks immediately dilate across the shallow slope, now angled upward.  The Sep’s engines scream as he wheels around in the distance past the city, heads back towards them.  The first impact rocks the ground beneath us them, sending men to their knees and bodies flying.  Men in the back of the loose formation cough as they detour pell-mell around the newly formed, smoking crater.

The slope they're climbing begins to steepen in earnest, coaxing renewed energy out of burning calves.  As yet, there's been no resistance from the city up the slope, which is as strange as it is hope-inspiring.  The bomber swings around again, behind them, and heads in for another strafing run; this time, a second one joins it.  If they can't get to the city before five or six make it here, they'll be obliterated as they run.

Two more explosions shake the valley, one off target but the other squarely in the middle of their ragged force, and four lights wink out in the Force.  Men scream and lose their footing.  Anakin grabs a man as he passes and hauls him along for a few steps, then curses under his breath and stops entirely, letting Obi-Wan take over leading the charge; Ahsoka sees this and cleaves stubbornly to his side. He closes his eyes and spreads his awareness in the Force over the area, yanking the injured in the back and around the two craters into the air and tossing them none-too-gently to the men in the front, who turn to receive them at the last moment thanks to Rex’s quick thinking.  He can feel Ahsoka doing the same, and projecting courage to the stragglers.  As the last sprinters pass him by, mostly medics grimly holding tight to their stretchers and Knight Kallist carrying her padawan on her back, Anakin turns his attention to the buzzards overhead and tries to muster the same state of mind that sent several thousand volts of electricity directly into Grievous’ chassis.

This does not happen.  What does happen is that the vulture drone coming in for its second pass swerves wildly and barely manages to recover before crashing into the side of the valley far to his right, forcing it to abandon its bombardment.  The Force catches fire with his own death then, and Anakin grabs Ahsoka’s upper arm and sprints out of the way before the other vulture can strafe the ground with laserfire exactly where they’d been standing.

Suddenly, a cheer rings out in the direction of the city.  For a moment, he fears the arrival of the native defense, but Ahsoka’s dread in the Force flips to delight a moment before he can look up himself to see the figures standing on the edge of the ridge, where the first of his own forces are now pulling themselves up before the shimmering shields.  The figures in blue and white, rushing out to pull their brothers over the final few paces to safety.

The rush of relief is enough to make Anakin’s head spin, but they're not out of danger yet.  They’ve caught up with the last of the stragglers on the final stretch of slope, Rex pulling a wounded man beside him in the rear, but the two vultures are swinging around from the east for a final pass.  Obi-Wan, Cody, and a handful of men in 212th orange are standing tall atop the ridge, taking stretchers from their exhausted carriers.  The more accurate of the two vultures is heading straight for them, engine buzzing like some enormous predatory insect, and stopping an object with forward momentum is a lot harder than pushing it to the side.

Ahsoka suddenly grips his wrist.  “Together.  Like the hyperdrive.”

“But I—”

“No time, Master, I was fine!”  She digs in her heels a few yards before the lip of the embankment, dragging him to a stop as well.  “Together!”

She’s right, it's almost on top of them.  Together they close their eyes and dive into the Force through the bond between them, a great lake fizzing with desperation and focus.  Coordinating through the overlap of their souls, they raise their hands and yank in tandem.

The further vulture spins out and crushes itself against a nearby hill.  The closer vulture, pulled directly downwards, digs a deep, short furrow in the ground before exploding only ten yards in front of them.  Ahsoka shrieks in surprise and jolts out of the Force, covering her face against the stinging debris and intense heat a moment before he can sweep his cloak over both of their heads and drag her to the lip of the plateau, where blue-painted gauntlets are already stretching down to pull them the rest of the way.  They scramble up and sprint for the half-visible shield.

Three more vultures streak over the horizon.

“Go, go, go!” Cody roars, and then they're inside, they're all inside, and Anakin can breathe again.

Chapter Text

The city is a blessing, but also an enigma.  The first thing Anakin does once he’s caught his breath and regained some equanimity is congratulate First Lieutenant Scruggs, the commander of the 501st contingent who helped them in, for taking the city with only 160 men.  Scruggs informs him that (a) they were 212 when they reached the city, having picked up another of the escape pods en route, and (b) they didn't actually have to take the city.  The streets were abandoned when they found it.

While their own contingent, led by Obi-Wan and Cody, integrates itself into the camp Scruggs’ men established upon their arrival two hours before, Anakin and Rex reconnoiter (or perhaps more accurately, wander aimlessly through) their new sanctuary, confirming his report.  The whole place is eerily empty, with not a single resident to be seen on the broad, cobbled avenues or the shiny, flat metal roofs of their low adobe dwellings.  They’re there, some of them: Anakin catches eyes peeping out at them from slitted windows as they pass, sees curtains hastily drawn out of the corner of his eye.  Counting their flickering presences in the Force as he passes, he comes to about 304.  Not nearly as many as there should be; even a very small outpost city like this should house 10,000 residents at least.  Knocking at length yields no result, and Anakin has no desire to give some poor civilian a heart attack, or start something he can't predict the outcome of, by knocking down a door to interrogate someone by force.  Still, the lack of information—the absolute silence—is unsettling.  Rex suggests displaying a small portion of their food and water supplies, what they can spare, in a central hub in hopes of luring informants out with the implicit promise to share.  Anakin gnaws his lip, considers their timeline, and agrees that it’s a good idea.

The shields are holding strong against a light bombardment, and a few of his best engineers confirm his assessment that they should hold for a good deal longer still; they’ll have to raise the power supplied to them when Dooku starts bombing in earnest, but there’s enough fuel cells squirreled away in the central power complex to keep the generators running at that level long enough for their food supply to run out and render continued shielding irrelevant.  It’s a stroke of luck, though not incredibly surprising, that this shielding technology is so familiar; Gamorr may be known as a mysterious, isolationist planet, but apparently they've benefited over the last few centuries from the usual trickle of smugglers, hooligans, and refugees that finds its way to off-the-grid planets like this regardless.  The other great thing about this city is its proximity to fresh water: There's a spring only seventy yards down the slope on the other side of the plateau, in the valley opposite the one they came in through.  They haven't gotten a chance to test it, of course—it's outside the shields, which is terrible design—but it looks fairly clear, and is undoubtedly the source of the city's water in peacetime.  As long as they can reach that between bombing raids, they have the option of replenishing their supplies, and due to their previous water run, they have enough to hold out for thirty days with normal rationing even if they can't.

Crisis held off for the immediate future, Obi-Wan seems to have gone back to not looking him in the eye, though that might just be both of their eyes closing at the slightest opportunity, like Ashoka's and literally all of the men’s.  Lieutenant Scruggs tells him he’s got them sleeping in shifts: another two hours and he’ll wake the half of his contingent currently dead to the world, and allow the other half, himself included, to catch the same four hours.  Obi-Wan designates half of their own unit to join them as soon as the medical complex and other immediate needs are mostly set up.  Meaning that in four hours exactly, Anakin will get to sleep as well.

Stars and galaxies, he’s tearing up just thinking about it.

Cody has already wrangled Ahsoka into joining the first sleeping shift by the time Anakin and Rex return from their city tour, a feat that reminds Anakin exactly how much he admires and appreciates his erstwhile co-commander.  He restrains an impulse to hug the guy.  Force, he is really sleep-deprived.  He misses Padme.  He really misses Padme.

Moment of weakness indulged and then buried, he heads back to the power complex to help the engineers setting up an encrypted long-range communication system that won't interfere with environmental sensors.  He makes the executive decision to pretend he’s hallucinated the sight of said engineering team passed out on the ground when he arrives; he knows what it takes to make a clone derelict in his duties during a crisis, and he's got the Force and two more blister packs of stims at the ready; he can handle the remaining setup on his own.  This might let them get in contact with Walton’s third of the army, but the chances are very small.  Dooku seems to have already set up fifth-gen multiconductor signal dampening arrays, which shouldn't stop Master Plo’s powerful onboard equipment but will probably catch the weak signals of planetside comms unless they get some truly odd magnetic action around here.

The little lights he’s been seeing out of the corners of his eyes have gotten a lot more difficult to ignore, and there's a crackling noise in his head that he's 80% sure is the sound of his own nerves passing Sith lightning bolts down his spine to his heels.  Rex comms, signal pinging off the completed communications relay instead of their portable network.  It’s been eight hours.  The General should feel free to join the third sleeping shift, since he saw fit to skip the second.

The cool metal flooring is more comfortable than any bed Anakin has ever slept in.

/B/

A solid six hours (??! unprecedented ) later, Anakin retracts his previous statement.  His back feels like one solid lump of dull radiating pain.  But this is secondary to the fact that Ahsoka is shaking him awake, and Obi-Wan is standing in the corner, frowning into his beard.

“What’s the crisis?”

“Strategy meeting,” Obi-Wan says.  “They’ve established a base camp.  We anticipate a land assault in the next two standard hours.”

Anakin considers this.  Overhead, a crackling, echoing boom, then another announces that the bombardment has begun in earnest.

Back at it, then.

He leverages himself to his feet, runs fingers through his greasy hair to get it out of his face.  “Do we have enough fresh forces for a preemptive assault?  Or is there not enough cover between us and them?”  Can't launch an assault with limited forces if you're going to be bombed to oblivion halfway there.

“Unfortunately, the base is in the middle of an open plain.  Dooku is clearly quite confident in his ability to keep our reinforcements out of his airspace.  It could work in our favor later, but for now such aggressive tactics would be far too costly.”

Anakin quells an automatic surge of annoyance at the word “aggressive,” but Obi-Wan must see it, because he quickly changes the subject.  They make it through a comprehensive and comparatively civil discussion of what Anakin’s missed in terms of camp setup, what Obi-Wan missed in the areas of scouting and communications, and increasingly complex defensive contingencies.  Their resources, and therefore their options, are quite limited, which helps to minimize conflict.  It’s mostly about how best to allocate their limited numbers in the case of an assault from either valley or along the ridge.  Between them, they work out some promising modifications to accommodate the standard siege protocols to their situation, to be passed on to Rex and Cody for further comments.

They're old hands at this point, have honed their siege tactics in worse circumstances than this, so soon enough they have the essentials squared away enough to confirm with their commanders and move on to other things.  Anakin’s brain is already mostly on sewage logistics, but something in Obi-Wan’s expression makes him pause, one foot to the door.  The bruises under his eyes are enormous, and there are tight lines of stress around his mouth.  He looks so old .  Force, the man’s only thirty-four.

Should he…say something?  Usually he would default to some light whining about the universe at large, giving Obi-Wan an opening to drily remark that at least the impossibility of getting supplies or reinforcements has cut down significantly on their paperwork load, or something similar.  But they're in such a weird place right now, their usual bantering ease feels almost inaccessible.  Padme is Obi-Wan’s friend, too.  What would Padme say?

Considering this, he realizes with a start that he's been so focused on his annoyance at Obi-Wan’s behavior that he’s barely thought about his old master’s injury, something he’d usually have nagged him over at least twice since the beginning of a rest period (relatively speaking) like this.  “Obi-Wan, how are you doing?”

His master looks startled, genuinely meeting his eyes for the first time.  “How am I—?  I’m fine, Anakin, I haven't left the dome.”

“Well, yeah, but you're not wearing your sling anymore.  Arm doing alright?”

“Yes, it’s holding up admirably.”  His eyes narrow, and the beard scrunches in that way it does when he’s caught himself biting his lip.  “...How are you feeling?”

Anakin shrugs and deliberately misinterprets him.  “Great, given the circumstances.  Think I’m not even concussed anymore.”

“That's, ah.  Good.”

…

“Uh.  I should probably catch up the engineers on some of the workarounds I used getting the relay up.  I’ll comm you if we get anything from Master Plo,” Anakin says brightly.

“Ah.  Yes, thank you.”  And Anakin makes his escape.

/B/

They fight, and they fight, and they fight some more.

This campaign is quickly proving every point Anakin’s ever made about why land warfare is worse than space warfare: It’s endless, grinding, and dirty in a way that a good clean heart-in-your-esophagus starfighter duel never is.  (Except when a space engagement stretches on past 72 hours or so—there’s a limit to how many stims you should take in one go, and Anakin has always preferred taking a pill to taking a rest.  He’s admittedly ended a few battles, uh.  Extremely high, with a long recovery period afterwards.  He’s been told he’s more fun that way, to which Kix responded with a look so absolutely terrifying that the offending pilot requested a reassignment to Execute Battalion.)

Anakin and Obi-Wan’s combined forces, including those who have recovered enough from their crash injuries to be mostly but not fully functional, number 520, with a good blaster for every man, but zero walkers and no heavy artillery other than the city’s huge built-in energy cannons, which are at least a hundred years old and constantly breaking.  They quickly become the bane of Anakin’s existence.  Knight Kallist’s intelligence reports that Dooku has about 1,700 droids landed on the side of a mountain twelve klicks southward, mostly regular battle droids but with forty or fifty supers mixed in.  Unless Dooku’s forces were severely depleted in whatever siege he abandoned to come here so quickly, this is less than half of the total troops he’s got up there, and he only ever throws three or four hundred at them at a time.  He’s being conservative, limiting the effectiveness of the city’s energy cannons by keeping his attacking forces sparse and maneuverable, and in the long term wearing them down rather than attempting to overwhelm them.  It’s unusual for Dooku, who is not a reckless commander by any means but never hesitates to use overwhelming force when he possesses it.  It's almost like the old bastard is uncertain of his direction—unusual—or working himself up to something.  While the former would be a nice break, it does not fill the Republic forces with confidence.

Dooku’s use of his air forces is much more typical.  The bombing continues at random intervals, like the torture method Anakin read about in a report from a Shadow on Ryloth, driving an operative slowly insane using only drips of water.  It averages out to about a bombing every four hours, but sometimes they go eight standard hours without a hit and sometimes the charges crackle and boom overhead for two hours without pause.  The shields invariably hold, but it wears on the nerves and makes sleep elusive for those who haven't got the knack of it (so, mostly the shinies).

Over the first four days of the siege, their numbers swell intermittently as stragglers from Walton’s contingent—located and bombed to every Sith Hell until Walton gave the order to scatter, the survivors relate with grim lines around their mouths—finally make it to the city.  More than once, a contingent fighting outside the shields has to suddenly reorient to shepherd in a dirty blue-and-white figure attempting a final sprint out of the treeline across the live battlefield.

Force be praised, Master Plo’s forces do finally arrive on the fifth day and begin to engage Dooku’s blockading fleet, which has moved directly overhead, in a very impressive light show.  The comms team establishes contact with Master Plo’s bridge, although it’s crackly and faint and only works every other hour.  The old Councillor sounds ruffled and deeply apologetic.  “We have only just pulled out of a siege three sectors from here,” he rumbles, smoothing his visibly dusty robes.  “I am glad you were able to hold out, Master Kenobi, Knight Skywalker.  The men were all very excited to hear about the defeat of General Grievous.  Is, ah….”  He’s warm as usual but audibly distracted, tone a bit brisk and vague, so Anakin smirks and gives his padawan a push to the mic, suppressing a twinge of jealousy at how her face lights up at getting to chat with the Jedi who found her.  As Padme has assured him multiple times, sometimes more and sometimes rather less gently, most people do, in fact, have friends.  Multiple of them, even.  And anyways, everyone should be happy to hear from his padawan, and everyone should make her happy to hear from them.

Master Plo concurs with ground command’s assessment: All their besieged army has to do—literally all they have to do—is keep the droids from making it within half a klick of the city with large-scale shield-draining land-based artillery or any sort of EMP shield-popper—both too heavy to be carried by aircraft or really anything but a tank, thank the Force, though Anakin remembers reading some innovative ideas about changing that early in the war, so he supposes it's only a matter of time.

So the name of the game, in these intermittent skirmishes of an hour max, is to anticipate and meet the approaching force, identify the tanks carrying the shield-popper and/or the biggest guns, and destroy them before they can get within range, while the droids attempt to protect their assets while killing as many clones as possible.  Since your average clone is worth at least five droids without an advanced droid commander in play (and, in Anakin’s humble opinion, the 501st is far from average), they're doing well against the small numbers Dooku’s sending against them, destroying or sabotaging tanks at a distance with the city’s cannons and the Force when possible.  Still, Dooku’s tactics of the hour have led to a few close calls.  Every time the energy cannons short out, they have to double their men outside the dome to finish off the attackers, and every time they succeed in wiping out more than 90% of Dooku’s droids, he sends a bombing strafe by that forces them to scramble back to cover like womprats to a hole.  And, of course, the constant fighting wears on their forces, makes them slower and sloppier until someone missteps.  There are casualties—small, less than five deaths and as many major injuries per day, but never insignificant.

Every night that there’s no active fighting, Knight Kallist borrows a handful of the fleet’s ARCs and slips off into the night, and by morning, something large has exploded in the distance.  Every time she puts a dent in Dooku’s anti-shielding artillery, the forces in the city get a break of at least six hours while Dooku is forced to land more, hopefully taxing whatever rudimentary supply lines he's managed to establish to the breaking point.  When there are no shield poppers to be found, Knight Kallist’s team sabotages droid tanks, new landers, anything they can.  

The bright spot is the space battle.  As the days wear on, it becomes more and more apparent that Dooku is not at his best, that he scrambled here from some other battlefield with diminished droid troops and depleted weapons capacities for waging a space battle.  If he has any of the more creative weaponry the Seps like to whip out to turn the tide of a battle, he's not using it.  Dooku is clearly fighting a losing battle.  For all that it feels almost impossible, some days in that long week, carting the wounded in from another phase in this unending battle and surveying his small army as it grows ever smaller, by day eight, their position is much more hopeful than a majority of the battles Anakin and Obi-Wan tend to be sent into.  As a result, they're fully in defense and conservation mode; there's no point in any of the daring and creative attacks the 501st is known for, because the outcome of the land battle genuinely doesn't matter, and attacking would only waste lives.  As long as Dooku keeps up these conservative land tactics, it's not really in question that they'll be able to hold the city until Plo has won the space battle.

The question is how many men will remain to be rescued by the time Plo Koon’s forces break through.  The question is how many more men will die in the medical tents who could have been saved if their bacta supplies weren't irretrievably spoiled in the crash.  The question is whether a third, or a half, or all but a handful of Anakin’s men will be ashes settling on the grass of Gamorr by the time victory comes.  And no matter how much the command class schemes and plots, batting around impossible hypotheses about radio waves and exploding aethersprites in the chilled, dry air of the Gamorrean night, there's genuinely nothing they can do to hasten their rescue.  And in the meantime, rations they can only sort of spare disappear from the main square at night, but the locals in their homes have yet to show themselves, and those who must have left are nowhere to be seen.  Anakin tries not to let it set his teeth on edge.

/B/

 On the ninth day, in a moment of levity during an evening lull, Ahsoka looks up from her painstakingly salvaged carnivore rations with a spark of mischief in her eyes.  She’s sitting on the ground this evening, leaning against his knees and inhibiting the habitual jiggling of his left leg.  “You know,” she says around a mouthful of dehydrated meat substitute, “you could really liven things up over there, if you wanted to.”  She nods her head to the right, where a group of clones have broken away from their huddle around a cobbled-together radiator to lob rocks at a crazily tilted road sign, cheering when someone makes a particularly centralized dent from twenty paces off.

Inwardly, her engagement rouses an answering spark in Anakin.  His little padawan has been faded throughout the past near-tenday of grinding intermittent combat, anxious boredom, and, at night, silent back-to-back support, her slight weight comforting through two sleeping bags in their shared tent.  It’s to be expected, he's seen and grieved this in her before.  There's only so much jokes and games can do, and heartfelt conversation seems even less effectual with the bombs interrupting every thirty seconds, breaking up overhead.

Outwardly, Anakin raises an eyebrow at Ahsoka and reaches out with his right hand to tip her mouth closed; she just grins at him and chews even more obnoxiously.  He snorts.  “How, exactly, do you propose I do that?”  Your average Jedi has a pretty significant accuracy advantage over a typical civilian, but that means a lot less against a clone; at this distance, the men would be pretty spot-on if they were actually trying.

Setting her empty wrapper aside, his padawan wiggles her fingers like a witch in a youngling’s cartoon.  “Give him a good zap!”

Anakin squints: Looks like someone’s scrawled a distantly recognizable caricature of Dooku on the sign in orange spraypaint.  Force knows who decided to lug the bottle all the way from the wreck of the Dominator.  “A ‘zap’ as in…?”

“You know what I mean.  The Grievous treatment.”

Though they don't give any visible indication, he feels several of the nearby clones’ attention abruptly snap to their conversation.  Eavesdropping is a plague in the 501st.  “See, that would be very exciting if I had any idea how to do that again.”

“Well isn't it about time you figured it out?  Imagine how satisfying it would be if Dooku finally bothered to come down here, and he was, like, arguing with Obi-Wan dramatically, and all of the sudden out of nowhere he just gets hit by lightning.  I bet his beard would fluff up like a bantha.”

Anakin can't help but chuckle at the visual, but then he falters, considering his mismatched hands.  “I can't really afford to short my arm out experimenting, though.”

She rolls her eyes.  “Just use your left, Master!  It didn't do anything last time.  Here, I know a good place to experiment.”  She jumps up and pulls insistently at his right shoulder until he drags himself back up to his aching feet.

The seven clones who were sitting around the radiator with them all scramble to their feet at the same time, whistling and glancing over their shoulders in an attempt to maintain the pretext that they weren't listening in and this is all a huge coincidence.  Oxer, their oldest veteran, grins sheepishly when he catches Anakin’s eye.  “Lovely night for a walk, isn't it?”

Anakin mock-glares at them.  “You all just want to see me look like an idiot, don't you.”

“Oh, they don't need a special occasion for that, General,” Fives puts in jovially, striding over from the rock-throwing group.  “I hear we’re testing out some new jetii nonsense?”

Whoever betrayed him over helmet comms, Anakin will find him when this is all over.  For the moment, he just sighs deeply.  “Lead the way, Snips, I think the entourage is getting impatient.”

She laughs at him and does as requested, tugging him along by the hand for a few steps like a much younger padawan—one of the few childish habits she truly retains, always eliciting a strong rush of fondness, bewilderment, and melancholy all mixed together.  They wend their way through the quietly buzzing camp to the outskirts of the city.  Overhead, the imminence of moonrise grants them a brief window during which to see a truly incredible scattering of stars, so many that their respective distance creates a sense of texture, like a great crumpled blanket crawling with millions of bioluminescent aphids.

By the time she stops in a sufficiently isolated spot, where not only the moonlit plateau but also the nearby houses are empty in the Force, their entourage has multiplied to fifteen jostling clones, and a festival atmosphere has sprouted up between them.  One of the privates has brought along Signpost Dooku.  He stabs it into the ground a few feet shy of an empty and fairly insulated-looking building, probably a refinery of some sort, and steps away with a flourish.  “All yours, General!”

Anakin grimaces; he knows exactly what’s about to happen, and it's going to be embarrassing.  Still, for safety’s sake, he waves everybody a good distance behind him before he raises his organic left hand and closes his eyes in concentration.

His awareness in the Force spools out around him, the world lighting up with life and potential.  Stretching out a hand, he reframes his consciousness to acknowledge the oneness and simultaneous non-ness of all physical things, the way he usually would to manipulate an inanimate object in the Force.  He understands that material variety is an illusion, that distance and space itself are illusions, while simultaneously grasping in his mind for matter at a distance.  And then he’s got a grip on the sign, charging it to humming with its own acceptance of its nonbeing.  This particular headspace became basically second nature to him almost ten years ago, so it’s been a long time since he thought through it deliberately, consciously.  At the same time, it's a surprisingly difficult exercise to just hold the sign and not actually manipulate it in any way.

Keeping his grip, he carefully opens the spigot on his emotional state, letting his stress and exhaustion and moderate physical pain leak back into his awareness and then, all at once, pushing them out toward the stationary signpost.

Nothing happens.

When this has gone on long enough to feel extremely awkward, he cracks open one eye, then the other and sighs heavily.  “Okay, this isn't working.  Anyone know a secret Sith conveniently in search of an apprentice?”

Ahsoka laughs at him.  “Don't give up already!  That isn't very Jedi-like of you, Skyguy.”

“Yeah, do or do not, I know the drill,” he sighs.  Switching tactics, he decides to just do what he usually does when he reaches for an object in the Force, but more…energetically?  Dooku’s got a lot of energy for a geriatric loth-lizard.

He stretches out his arm again and thinks back to that time he accidentally took four stims in an hour because he kept forgetting he’d taken any.  It’s not hard to summon the feeling.  There is a sound like shearing metal, and the clones ooh appreciatively.  He opens his eyes.  The sign is still standing, technically, but the pole has crumpled in on itself like a deranged Correlian accordion, with not a soot stain to be seen.  “Kriff.”

“Try again, Master!” his padawan grins, not doing much to hide the fact that she's, still, laughing at him.  Her amusement blooms out into the Force, bright-colored ink in dirty water.

He glares at the sign.  Orange Spraypaint Dooku stares back, mockingly, from behind his absolutely enormous beard.  That aspect is actually pretty lifelike; thinking back on the Darksider best practices he’s figured out so far, he tries to summon the anger he might feel if Dooku was really here.  “You dare to make me ruffle my perfectly trimmed mustache?  Know your place, boy.  Now where is Obi-Wan, I feel a need to monologue at length about something boring.”  No, it's not working; Orange Spraypaint Dooku is too funny to inspire rage, and to be honest, genuinely getting angry here sounds kind of exhausting.  Also, some of the older clones have started heckling him ( “You got this, General!”  “Think evil thoughts!” ), which isn't doing wonders for his concentration.  

Irked by his defeat, he crosses his arms and stumps back over to Ahsoka and the others.  “Okay, I honestly have no idea what I’m doing.  Maybe it was a one-time thing.”

“Maybe it has to be the other hand?” Ahsoka posits, while Fives suggests, “Any chance you really did just step on a live wire back then?”  At Anakin’s expression, he shrugs, grinning.  “What?  It happens, like, every other week, General, don't act like it's so unlikely.”

“You two are stunningly unhelpful.”

“Okay, let's think about this,” Ahsoka ventures, unconsciously mirroring Anakin’s arms-crossed posture as she suppresses her giggles to put her thinking face on.  “Talk us through it.  What did it feel like when you fried Grievous?  Was the resonance in the Force unusual?  Were you trying to do something specific?”

Anakin considers.  “It happened really fast, I remember that.  I was just trying to pry him open—no, wait, that's wrong.  I already had him open, didn't I?”

“Yep, his whole, uh, situation was just hanging out there.  It was nasty,” Fives confirms, making a face.

“One of the cables snapped,” Ahsoka supplies.  “I thought he was going to get me, actually.  I remember being kind of mad about it—I almost beat the guy before, you know, no way he was gonna snap my neck out of pure dumb luck.”

Oh, right.  Anakin holds back his reflexive shudder at her phrasing, suppressing the fear that the memory evokes.  “Okay, yeah, that’s what it was.  I was trying to get there first.”  He blinks.  “I wasn't even trying to reach him in the Force, so much, I was just trying to get over there fast enough.  But I guess I was still a few levels deep from prying at the armor and the, uh, signals got crossed?”

“Hmm.  I guess that sort of makes sense?  Try to recreate what that felt like,” Ahsoka says, gesturing back to Orange Spraypaint Dooku.

Anakin paces back over to the cleared area, embarrassment returning with the sense of their expectant gazes on his back.  He’s never felt comfortable being bad at something in front of people.  It was a large part of what made his early classes in rhetoric and history, and meditation especially, a living hell.  Even Obi-Wan’s judgment he could only tolerate in short intervals before he would snap at him out of pure embarrassment and have to storm off to tinker with droids for a few hours, reassure himself of his own competence.  A large part of the reason he learned dueling so fast was the extra practice sessions he put in at night, in private moments, whenever he could, training until he collapsed so he could come to their next lesson together just a little less awful.

But he’s got to model good behavior for his padawan, including things like “There’s no shame in failure, making mistakes is how we learn!” (he does remember Obi-Wan’s banthashit platitudes, the hypocrite), so he sucks it up and hopes he's not blushing visibly.  Probably too much grime on his face to tell at this point.  He stares at the defaced, crumpled sign, lets his consciousness pool out into the space around them, and tries to recall the sense of leaping forward, narrowing himself into a point, traveling impossibly fast through space.  Tries to recall the pure need to move he felt when he saw that monster's hand reaching for his padawan’s head.  His consciousness in the Force narrows, narrows, until all his awareness is tunneling in with his vision on Spraypaint Dooku’s mocking orange face.

Focus, focus, focus….

Kra-boom-ZZAP!!  Anakin nearly jumps out of his skin at the sound of a huge blast only a few yards away from them, eyes snapping open in time to flinch as the afterimage of purple light burns itself into his retinas and dirt rains down on his head like an undignified cloudburst.  Blinking furiously, he searches the clearing for Ahsoka and the men, finds them unharmed and cheering as the ringing in his ears dies down.  “What the hell just happened?” he shouts, jogging back over.

“Bombing raid, General, did you not hear the vulture coming?”

“Looks like he missed the shield over us and hit the dirt outside, and then right after that you managed to zap Dooku, it was badass!” Oxer’s favorite shiny gushes excitedly.  Oxer cuffs him good-naturedly on the back of the head, and he blushes.   “Ah, respectfully, sir.”

“I felt your surprise in the Force, Skyguy,” Ahsoka notes as he rubs the last of the purple glare out of his eyes and looks around again, finally noticing the massive smoking crater just outside the shields and the enormous scorch mark obscuring Orange Spraypaint Dooku completely.  The sign itself is leaning to the left at a strange angle, its base loosened from its hole in the ground.  “Maybe that's what makes it work?  A psychic state associated with sudden bursts of adrenaline?  That could induce, like, a rapid surfacing or outsurge in the Force, agitating the flow of relativity between living things.  Uh.  Right?”  She has to shout the last sentences over the escalating booms of the continuing raid somewhere to the northeast, but at least it seems like they're leaving this sector alone this time around.

“I mean, Dooku never seems particularly stressed when he does it.  I don't think we've ever even managed to sneak up on him.”  Heart rate finally settling down again, Anakin notes the tingling in his fingers, examines his hand.  His fingers are dirty and his fingernails jagged, but not beyond the usual.  He thinks back: What did it actually feel like, what was he doing in the Force in that moment that was different, other than channeling it through fear rather than calm?  Something about that split second felt…familiar, actually; it ripples at the back of his brain.

Most of the clones have wandered off, now that the promise of excitement has been fulfilled and showtime has given place to chatting about jetii nonsense, but Fives and two others remain, listening curiously despite the distraction of the intermittent strikes.  “Is it actually electricity, do you think?” Fives asks.  “Or is it another kind of weird thing that just looks like electricity?”

“Sith lightning is weird.  Most scholars at the Temple don't think it’s really….” Ahsoka begins explaining, but Anakin tunes both her and the continuing explosions out, trying to grasp what that made him think of.  Paranoia about his prosthetic aside, he hasn't been thinking of this as an electrical problem because (a) Ahsoka is right, the consensus is that Sith lightning is supernatural as manifested, though electrical in its effects, and (b) as he’s resented before, the Jedi aren't really taught to think of Force phenomena in conventional scientific terms.  Manipulations through the Force tend to reflect the traditional laws of physics unpredictably if at all, so while the archives do contain millennia’s worth of eccentric Jedi’s convoluted theories about the physical mechanics of the Force on this plane, the courses available to padawans and knights focus on the theological, philosophical, and functional sides of any given problem, with only the basics of that type of theory.

But Anakin was an engineer before he was a Jedi.  If Sith lightning were actual electricity, or at least analogous to it, what would that mean?  Electricity results from a separation of charges.  Lightning forms through electrostatic discharges between two charged regions, with an electro-chemical reduction of waterborne air particles generating airborne plasma to conduct the charge.  When he threw himself forward in the Force to stop Grievous, his consciousness was mostly focused on, or perhaps more accurately occupying, two positions at once: his body, i.e. the anchor point for his existence on this plane, and his target, the area around Grievous—but his attention, or intention, was entirely on the latter.  His desire to eliminate the space between those two points generated something like the thin channels in the Force he created to poison Krell’s mind back at the Temple without being detected— that’s what felt familiar—but much narrower and much faster.  Could the sudden, reckless shifting of his “weight” in the Force have created something analogous to a separation of charges between his body and his target, with a conductive channel of his own Force presence between them?

Experimentally, he takes a few big steps away from his padawan and his corporal, and once again reaches his flesh hand out toward the beleaguered signpost.  Tuning out the crackling booms of the energy cannons, now roused to repel the bombers, and the low hum beginning to emanate from the strained shields, he takes a deep breath and then throws himself violently between spaces in the Force.

Nothing happens, except the sign crunches itself a little more crazily to the left.  Hm.  He breathes in again, then reconsiders.  This time on a huffed breath out instead of in, and wrapping his mind firmly around the alternate paradoxical idea of eliminating, denying the space between points rather than simply understanding the nonexistence of that space, and with all the force of his anxious fear for his men, for his padawan, for his master rising into his throat, he hurls himself at it again.

CRACKOOM!!

The sign, completely blackened halfway down its tortuously twisted pole, makes a series of sad little thunks as it rolls across the ground, finally coming to a stop fifteen feet away.

He turns back to his corporal and commander, whose conversation must have been rudely interrupted judging by their taken-aback staring at the late Spraypaint Dooku, and he grins sharply.  “Corporal, any chance you’re secretly a Sith?  I think you might be a Dark theological prodigy.”

Fives is confused but delighted.  Ahsoka is ecstatic.  “Can I— ”

“No.”

“But—”

“No.”

/B/

That night, curled up back-to-back in their respective sleeping bags, Ahsoka elbows him gently in the back.  “Skyguy?” she says quietly.  “You awake?”

He grumbles something in response, because he was very nearly not awake and would actually prefer to continue down that route, but then he registers the seriousness in her voice and forces himself a bit more alert.  “Yeah, Snips?”

“I was joking about the lightning a lot.  But it doesn't…hurt, does it?

“Hurt how?”

“I…wasn't paying attention, when you did it the second time, but if it comes from…fear, and stress….”

Oh.

“I did hurt you, on the bridge, when we busted their hyperdrive.  Didn't I,” Anakin asks, hating himself for asking and hating himself for knowing the answer.  He slams his side of the bond closed as quickly as he can—he will not make her feel his guilt while she says what needs to be said.

A pause.  “You didn't really hurt me.  Just threw me off for a minute.  And it's not like I didn't know what I was getting into.”

That’s true.  She probably would have been able to sense his storm of emotion in the Force from the other side of the destroyer, so of course she could feel it from right next to him, even if she couldn't tell the full extent of it until she dropped to his level in deep meditation.  But that's not an excuse.  That's not anything, he shouldn't be feeling those things in the first place when he has a psychic bond with a child.   The depths of his repugnance surprise even him, sometimes; he has no idea how he can possibly keep looking at this little firecracker of a kid, feels such an extraordinary, all-consuming fondness for her, and still snap at her, hurt her, again and again.  Even when they got into a groove as teacher and student, even when he started to think maybe she was like him, she didn't fit into the Temple either, and maybe he could be what she needed too—but from the start, from their disastrous first meeting, he’s done nothing but hurt her.

“I’m sorry, Snips,” he says quietly, staring at the dark canvas of the tent.

“No, you're not hearing me,” she says, waspish, and the annoyance in her voice jolts him out of his spiral for a moment.  “You didn't hurt me, that's what I just said.  That's not my point.”

“You—?  I’m…sorry, Ahsoka, what did you want to say?”

“It.  It didn't hurt.  But you did…scare me, honestly,” she says in a quiet, serious voice.  “I barely recognized you.  If it was that bad for me, and I only dipped a toe in, then it was really bad, Skyguy .  This whole thing is….”  Her sleeping bag rustles as she shifts positions.  “If I have to be careful, then so do you.”

He mulls that over.  It’s true, he can't expect her to be careful if all he’s ever showing her is reckless behavior.  By all the Sith Hells, she’s already the apprentice of a fallen Jedi, he’s really got to clean up his act if she's going to have any chance at all out there.

“Okay, Ahsoka.  I’ll be careful.”  He feels her nod silently against the back of his neck.

And then: “Totally keep practicing the lightning thing though.  That was badass.”

He cracks up, she giggles, and the moment is broken.  And then, a moment later:

“And if it’s safe, then—!”

“Not happening.”

…Oh Force, he wasn't even looking at her and he could feel the big sad eyes.

“...Okay, maybe e ven tually—”

“I’ll take it!!”

He laughs and lets it go.  There are battles that are not worth fighting.

/B/

On the tenth day, after visibly losing a third star destroyer from his fleet to Master Plo’s steady assault, Dooku changes strategies.  He starts using this absolutely infuriating tactic where he forces clones to charge out of the city to hold back a ground assault dragging siege equipment, and then he bombs his own droids in order to kill Anakin’s men.  This would not be a realistic long-term strategy even if Dooku were fighting with full, refreshed numbers: Droids aren't cheap, and even if Dooku has superior numbers in this engagement, the Separatists are currently fighting on eight fronts simultaneously.  Dooku should not be able to do something like this.  And yet.

In order to give them even a chance at holding the shields, the polite but distantly professional Knight Kallist has switched to a fully nocturnal schedule, spending all her time running sabotage missions.  In the rare occasions they exchange a word or two anymore, he sees her fur becoming lank and greasy; she walks with a kind of grim determination that speaks of utter exhaustion.  They have to withdraw the rations supplied to the cowering locals in the main square, increasing each man's allotment to compensate for the increased energy expenditure and blows to morale.  These rations had previously been disappearing slowly but surely as furtive figures crept uncontested in and out at night, fleeing if approached; the most they've been able to get out of these nervous beneficiaries without forcibly detaining anyone were a few panicked and expansive pantomime gestures from an older woman in a rough homespun robe, who hid her rations when approached as if they weren't deliberately supplied for her benefit, demonstrating that at least some Gamorreans don't speak or read a word of Basic.  For the next few nights after they withdraw the rations, the troopers report shadows slipping into the square, taking water, and appearing frustrated at the absence of the food.  Anakin should probably feel guilty—he can sense that Obi-Wan does, when Fives updates them on it—but he just sort of doesn't.  These paranoid civilians in their picturesque little city have been spared the entire war , they can deal with a few weeks of peaceful occupation.

On the daytime front, Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Ahsoka have essentially become mobile shield generators in response to Dooku’s new tactic.  One or two of them head out with every deployment only to meditate really hard in the middle of the battlefield, deflecting as many bombs one by one as they can while their men periodically drag them out of the way of blasterfire, which is an incredibly frustrating way to fight a war.  For the first few hours, Anakin tries to make a game of it with Ahsoka like they usually do, counting the bombs that each of them manages to bounce back into the enemy.  But it’s so simultaneously exhausting and monotonous that they give it up fairly quickly, and work in silence.  Occasionally, a shell gets through.

It’s missions like this that make him feel like the war is excavating his bones from beneath his skin, flaying him alive like he once saw a sandstorm do to a slave who stole kef.  Some days, he feels like nothing moreso than a bundle of exposed nerves sparking at random in the wind.  Some days he feels like a dog off his leash.  Some days he feels a little insane.  Especially when he’s in the middle of battle, when they’ve been holding the line on the exposed rock of the valley all day with no recess, and he looks up, covered in dirt and oil with blood in his teeth, with the now-familiar feeling of the Dark Side singing in his veins, and makes eye contact with Obi-Wan, with a dirt-smeared face and wariness in his eyes.  He really does feel like he’s going insane, in moments like that.

But he can't be.  Can't be a dog off his leash, because whenever he turns around there’s Ahsoka, and a mad dog can't do anything for her.  So he licks the blood off his teeth and folds the hysteria up and away like a magic trick, and pretends until the lie is more or less the truth.  Close enough for engineering.

/B/

For all that, it isn’t until the fifteenth day that things really come to a head.  Anakin is dozing against the back wall of the lookout tower near the western side of the city, where the main energy cannons are located.  It’s the wee hours of the morning, maybe a standard hour from Gamorr’s single sunrise, and he’s on call with two other engineers in case electrical issues arise requiring adjustments to difficult-to-access parts, though he thinks that might be an excuse Kix bribed Bodge from the engineer corps to give him in order to convince him to sleep more.  Just another front in the cold war waged across the galaxy between Jedi Generals and their chief medical officers.  At least he’s not nearly as bad as Obi-Wan.

Abruptly, he startles fully awake, the Force screaming at him that something is wrong.  Not safe, not safe, not safe!

“Bodge, Screwtop!” he shouts, startling everyone in the room and stumbling over his own robes in his haste to get to his feet.  “Comm Rex and Cody, tell them I think we've got major incoming!”

“Understood, sir!  Any idea which direction?”

“No clue.  I’ll see if the other Jedi know.  I’m going scouting, tell Rex I think we should concentrate at points B and F!”  He has to throw the last bit over his shoulder, already taking the exit stairs two at a time.

Precognition is finicky.  He dreamed his mother’s death for weeks in advance, but an immediate and clear warning like this tends to indicate danger in the next few seconds or minutes, half an hour at most.  Some Jedi report subtle, creeping feelings of unease alerting them hours or days in advance, but Anakin has never experienced that, or possibly he’s some type of uneasy too often to notice the difference.

Chances are, the danger he’s sensing will be here in the next five minutes—most likely a full-scale dawn raid.  Anakin distrusts the valley opposite Dooku’s camp, suspecting a pincer maneuver.  The best thing he can do now is probably to run there out and try to spot any enemies alone while the camp prepares on all fronts; a lone scout is better for stealth, and a Force-assisted sprint is faster than any of the clones could manage on foot.

His comm pings: Rex.  He shoves his earbud in as he runs.  “Captain!  Any signs?”

“Negative, General.  Where are you now?”

“Going scouting to the east.”

At the beginning of their association, Rex probably would have objected strenuously to this, but by now he’s used to the irregularities introduced by Force-trained commanding officers and just acknowledges grimly.  “Understood.  I've got the Commander here, she sensed something as well but has no additional info.”

“Got it.  Put out an all-hands, Obi-Wan isn't answering comms and we need him to scout the south if he hasn't sensed anything.  I don't want Ahsoka out there.”

“Agreed.  We’re mustering A through H, with double ranks at B, D, and F.  Cannons charged and ready to rumble.  Keep your comm on, General.”

“Will do.  Don't die, Rex.”

“No such plans, sir.”  Anakin nearly smirks at the grim humor in his tone and ends the call as he passes through the city’s shield, wincing as the sting up his mechanical arm attests to its full power.  He should've slowed down more, he probably narrowly avoided exceeding its momentum threshold and hitting it like a bug on a windshield.  But now he's out, and only a few seconds later he’s across the exposed area of the city’s eastern ridge and diving into the blackness between the trees.

Two minutes and three quarters of a mile out, he nearly runs directly into them, not noticing the Force’s warning of their presence beneath the painful pulses of generalized alarm making the world waver around him.  Going by their processing unit lights, the noise they're making crunching through the brush, and what the occasional patch of moonlight reveals, there are at least two hundred droids picking their way through the predawn forest at a decent clip, given the terrible terrain.  He also estimates two thirty-man units carting speeders behind them, slowing down the march but not stopping it.  No tanks could make it through this terrain with any subtlety, but knowing Dooku, they'll probably steam in across the open valley once the element of surprise is lost.

Anakin watches tiny red and green lights bob ominously between tree trunks for another thirty seconds, then retreats to a safe distance and comms the open command class line.  Rex answers first, and then Obi-Wan pops on a few seconds later.  “I’ve got around two hundred-man infantry troops and at least sixty speeder-mounted coming in along the eastern ridge.  ETA 0415 standard, ten minutes at this pace.  I think they've probably got another force coming in on the opposite ridge, trying to pincer us, and I wouldn't be surprised if they send in tanks across the south valley within the hour.  Obi-Wan, we need that scouted.”

Obi-Wan hums, a quality to his voice that makes clear he's just woken up in a hurry (for someone who’s known him as long as Anakin).  “We’re on the same page, then?  Plan E3, or E—ah—a preemptive attack to push them off the ridges, yes?  Do we want them in the south valley or the north?”

Cody, who joined the line at some point Anakin didn't notice, offers, “South valley is still my pick.  We don't have the men to cover both sides of the dome with these numbers, even if it would be good to cut them off from reinforcements.”

“Agreed,” Anakin says, and Rex echoes a short, wordless affirmative.  “But I think we should hold off activating the ridge traps until we’ve used the thin spots to our advantage as much as possible.  Wait until we're overwhelmed.  If one clone can take on three to five clankers easy, I like our odds on the eastern ridge at least.”

“We’ll need to keep the ridges communicating, then, so we can set them off at once on both sides,” Cody offers.  “West ridge will probably give first, we’ll have to give east time to fake a retreat.”  Anakin’s shoulders dip with a modicum of relief; Cody’s tacit agreement will do a lot to sway Obi-Wan.

“I recommend Scruggs for the east ridge,” Rex adds.  That Anakin and Rex will be leading the charge on the wider, harder-to-defend western ridge while Obi-Wan and Cody prepare for the real battle to come in the south valley need not be stated.  Old habits, at this point.

A pause, and then: “I’ve confirmed with Second Lieutenant Taxa in Demolitions, delayed explosives are a go.  Alright, gentlemen, happy hunting.”  With that, Obi-Wan blips off the call, with Cody right behind him.  The old man is probably already attending to a million and one smaller tasks and checks before impact, Anakin knows from experience.  One of these will have been sending out their fastest, subtlest scouts toward all points of the compass, and especially the opposite ridge.  It’s a good thing Obi-Wan wasn't on comms when he first got the premonition—in retrospect, they definitely can't afford to have both generals out of the shield under these conditions.  That was stupid of him.

A twig snaps behind Anakin, and he jolts back to full awareness of his surroundings, pressing himself further into the trunk of one of Gamorr’s tall, feathery-fronded trees.  But the Force, turbulent as it is, carries no unusual ripples; it was just an animal passing through.  He starts to pick his way back toward the city at a wary, light-footed jog, relying on the Force as much as his eyesight to ghost swiftly through the gloom.  “Rex,” he mutters, “does this change anything I’m forgetting?”

Rex considers the question.  “No, the men are prepared for this scenario, the approach isn’t revolutionary.  Typical of the Count.  The only thing that comes to mind is, when we set off those explosives on the western ridge, we’ll be losing our best evacuation route.  If the shields break, we know how to evade bombers as much as anyone can, but what about civilians?”

Anakin closes his eyes briefly.  “If possible, knock on doors, evacuate civilians to point G now, so they're ready to run for the north valley if they need to.  But we can't afford to waste any lives on it, understood?”

“But General—”

“I don't like it either, Captain, but there's too few of us.  If we can't hold them off then we're all dead, and them too.”

Rex is silent for a moment, leaving space and a faint crackling over the comm.  “Understood.  Relaying.”

“I’m heading back now, meet you and Snips on the west side?”

“Roger.  And please, be on time this time, sir?” Rex shoots back, a touch of his characteristic humor returning to his voice.  “This is a hell of a party we'll be kicking off.”

Anakin grins sharply in the darkness.  “Wouldn't miss it for the world.”

/B/

The battle begins like this: The first few lines of droids emerge quietly from the trees onto the rocky neck of the ridge, expecting to take the sleeping clones by surprise, only to be confronted by ten lines of white-and-blue armor standing perfectly still and silent between them and their objective.

The clones’ helmet lights flick on in unison.  Three burning lines of blue and green flicker on with them.  The world is silent, and then suddenly very loud.

As prepared as the Republic forces are, both ridges very quickly turn into droid slaughterhouses.  One clone is worth three to five droids, after all, so choke points like these where they're forced to meet on even terms almost always foster Republic victories.  If the droids had gotten past the thinnest part of the ridge before Torrent could meet them, it would've been another story, but today, Anakin gave them the edge they needed.

They fall into a rhythm, Anakin and Ahsoka whirling and slashing and kicking droids off the ridge at the front of the seventy men of Torrent holding the six-yard neck of rock and dirt, then ducking and fading back into the ranks every five minutes or so to catch their breath.  The air is quickly choked with dust and shouting and whirring blaster bolts, the Force a miasma of vibrating death.  On the other hand, the blasterfire gives them more strobing light to see by.  The manic joy of it seizes him all at once and he laughs aloud, surging forward to tunnel deep into the clankers’ ranks and then skip back over their heads when the pressure kills his momentum.  Behind him, Ahsoka trills a Togruta hunting cry, and the clones hoot in answer, a modified Mandalorian war chant spreading from twenty to fifty to seventy throats in ecstatic synchrony.

Anakin’s mortality thrums through him twice, ten times, a hundred times, prompting him to dodge laser blasts by a hair’s breadth, stab a clanker through the processing unit before it can sneak up on Ahsoka, whirl to block fire from below him and to his left—the droids behind the choke point have started to drop off the ridge and pick their way forward along the steep slope, taking their chances from below, and while the thick ranks of Torrent behind Anakin and Ahsoka are killing them in droves from their elevated position, they're starting to feel the pressure.

They sweat, and they shout, and they sing, and at one point Anakin looks up and realizes, to his shock, that the sun is two fingers high in the east.

They hold the western ridge for a full sixty-five minutes, in the end, but inevitably it starts to sink in that there's just too many droids.  If the enemy were trapped in the choke, they might have held off indefinitely, but when the droids stop being hesitant to fall off the ridge, they start pushing forward in a mass, shoving their hapless frontline off its feet.  These unfortunate droids flail and complain in their annoying, nasally voices, throwing grotesque bluish shadows in the pale dawn light before they're cut to pieces and thrown aside.  But Anakin, Ahsoka, and the front line of skilled veterans can't keep killing them and throwing them off fast enough; eventually, they struggle to even reach the live, pushing droids behind the wall of droid husks and detritus they're shoving in front of them.  Slowly but surely, they're pushed back toward the shields by an indomitable wave of emotionless mechanical strength.  Even if they were willing to sacrifice their own frontlines by shoving back in kind, they simply don't have the numbers behind them to resist.

Panting, Anakin is pushed back ten feet, then another ten.  He locks eyes with Rex on his right, past the two men between them and through the visor in Rex's helmet, and mouths the order.  Rex nods confirmation.  Knowing him, he was already in contact with Scruggs on helmet radio, letting the east ridge know to begin their retreat.

They first met the droids about fifty yards from the city’s shield.  That became forty yards by half an hour into the engagement, and now they're rapidly being pushed back to the thirty-yard mark, with the ridge widening and becoming harder to hold as they go.  The improvised explosives they seeded both ridges with, burying the charges in the dead of night between bombing raids, extend from forty to twenty yards out at two-yard intervals.  Anakin would’ve used more, but Obi-Wan judged that they couldn't spare the fuel cells in case this became a multi-week siege.  In a rare change of pace, Anakin hopes he doesn't get to say “I told you so.”

When they pass the twenty-yard mark, Anakin fades back into the ranks and puts his wrist comm to his mouth.  “Rex, any word from Scruggs?” he shouts.

The answer is barely audible even over his earpiece, the main reason Rex and Cody, with their peripheral-vision-obscuring but noise-dampening helmets, tend to stick close to their generals and handle communications for them.  “Not yet, he's on the retreat, but—”  A yellow light blinks on the side of Anakin’s wrist comm just as Rex cuts himself off.  “Yes, we are a go for fireworks!”  Fives and Echo, who have ended up on either side of Anakin, both cheer, possibly not realizing anyone can hear them through their helmets.  Regardless, he agrees wholeheartedly.

“Alright, everyone, we break on my signal!” Anakin reminds the general Torrent channel, and the ambient noise of Mandalorian-accented shouting quiets just a bit.  This is the riskiest part of the plan: They want to get as many droids as possible with the explosives without harming their own men, but they don't want to actually let any droids through the shield, so they have to lure them pretty far but not too far.  And ideally, they want to coordinate this perfectly on both sides of the city.  Plus, it's always perilous to turn one's back on the enemy.  To avoid showing their backs, the clones are trained to retreat in phases, three lines at a time, taking advantage of the looseness of their quincunx formation so each retreating squad can almost instantly fade back into the squad behind them, who are already laying down cover fire between their brothers.

It's hot and sweaty in the middle of the ranks; for all the space left in their formation, Anakin is jostled by armored shoulders on both side and blinded by sweeping helmet lights as the men fire on the droids on the sides of the ridge as well as in front.  Steady, steady….

The Force chimes rightness through him as the front line is pushed back past the twenty-yard mark.  He thrusts his lightsaber into the air and roars, “Retreat!!”

The first three lines immediately sprint back into the crowd, and Anakin with them.  The back half of the company is also retreating fast, leaving more room to maneuver, while successive lines of men in the front half cover for their brothers in a flawless chain reaction.  Breaking through the back of the front half of the company alongside a growing flood of fleeing brothers, Anakin veers for the left edge of the ridge, both so he can deflect blasts away from the running men and so he can see Second Lieutenant Taxa from the demolition squad eight yards away.  Illuminated by the strengthening sunlight, he's holding a plain, innocent-looking metal cord whose other end is buried in the semi-packed, sandy dirt between two slabs of rock.  Taxa’s anxiety and focus spike through the Force all at once, washing Anakin in a cool wave of mint and spoiled blue milk.  Anakin’s breath catches.  Taxa pulls hard on the cord.

Nothing happens.

Shit.

On the other side of the city, an enormous boom rings out, and then even more in quick succession, accompanied by the rumbling of a minor avalanche.  On this side, Taxa tugs again and again with increasing panic on a trigger cord that doesn't seem to be working.

The tension in the Force ratchets up to new levels as more brothers realize something's gone wrong.  Ahsoka’s running back up to the front, lightsabers flashing; he hears her screaming into comms to stall the retreat.  They only have a few lines left to hold off the tide of tinnily cheering droids, who might also realize the significance of those distant booms any moment now.  They need their own IEDs to go off right now or they'll really be in the Force-damned gundark’s nest.

His first thought is to run back to the front and try to light up one of the buried explosives directly with Force heating, but the droids have already rolled past the IED closest to the shield, and that might not reliably set off the whole chain reaction.  They're supposed to send an electrical charge through the—

Anakin sprints across the eight yards between him and Taxa, fast enough that the guy actually jumps when he skids to a stop in front of him.  “Cable!” he yelps, and Taxa throws the end at him without question.  Closing his eyes and praying with all the faith in the Force he can muster, Anakin throws his blinding desire to win this down the cable, through the ground, to its unseen conclusion.

BOOM!  BOOM!  BOOM -BOOM-BOOM BA-BA- BOOM!!!

Anakin can't hear anything, after that, except the ringing in his ears.  He can't see shit beyond the stampede of white-and-blue figures emerging from the cloud of dust billowing up ten stories into the air.  But he can feel the tide turning in the Force, Torrent’s relief and elation and appreciation of a good explosion layered over Ahsoka’s fierce protective glee.  He can picture what's happening within that cloud: Thousands of pounds of dirt and rock dumping hundreds of droids, mostly in pieces, off the left side of the ridge into the southern valley.  When the dust clears in an hour or two, there should be a yard or two of bare rock left intact along the former right side of the ridge, pockmarked and uneven and falling off steeply on both sides, but nothing significant enough to attack across.  The 501st’s demolition experts have had a lot of practice.

He crouches for a moment longer, listening to his pulse pound the drumbeat I’m alive, I’m alive beneath the high whine of his tinnitus.  For miles around, the Force is alight with firecracker aftertaste as their dust cloud turns dawn into deepest night.  For ten seconds, he lets himself ride the high.

And then he pushes himself to his feet and takes off shouting orders again, because now the real battle begins.

/B/

Anakin slashes and stabs; the sun rotates on its implacable track to directly overhead.  The heat becomes oppressive.  Torrent moves in synchrony.  Tactical wins come in flashes of brilliant insight, plans kaleidoscoping together perfectly on ten parts of the miles-long battlefield even as everything falls apart on another seven, and the euphoria blends with the adrenaline which blends with the numbing effect when a few hours’ exertion grants a sudden, illusory renewal of energy.  And he catches himself thinking, again, that this war could have something breathtaking in it.  The naked violence that makes men capable of anything, exposing the iron courage beneath layers of vulnerable flesh.  The feeling, in the Force, of six million lives straining, straining forward towards the same goal.  Guilt stabs at him for thinking it; there is nothing beautiful in the dirt-crusted viscera littering the bombing plain, or the furtive way his padawan eats too quickly.  And yet he thinks he might miss it, when it's over: the immediacy of it, crystallizing all history and personality into the space of an indrawn breath; power made manifest, generated, imposed, and consumed in the white-hot absence of artifice.  He can't help but worship it even as it twists the knife in his back.  This could ruin him, he thinks.  This is an abyss that could swallow him whole.

/B/

Those particular reflections will not, however, make it into his report when the battle is long over.  What history will remember is this: For hours, they balance on the hairsbreadth between victory and defeat.  On a grand scale, they gain ground and lose it in great waves, rhythmic and predictable but death to grow inured to.  In the meantime, however, the droids nearly manage to lure their right wing out and flank them once, and succeed in devastating two squads with sudden coordinated infantry retreats to make room for more mobile speeder charges.  They also come terrifyingly close to taking down the shields with a compact EMP at one point before Cody’s men discover it; he doesn't find out about that one until hours later.

On the other hand, a handful of clone privates separated from their squadron have the crazy-stupid-genius idea to climb over the remnants of the city’s eastern ridge and use it as cover to sneak a mile behind the enemy’s lines, scramble back over, and drop down directly on top of the enemy’s second-largest shield–popping tank.  The 501st’s radio engineers also independently manage to exploit a momentary signal surge created by the space battle above to wipe out two hundred droids with a virus, both of which neatly demonstrate why Anakin’s legion is the best in the GAR, no contest, end of story.

Anakin’s learned that, in the end, whether the outcome of a battle will be decided by some broad-scale brilliant flanking technique or one of these smaller victories of individual opportunity and initiative—or else some devastating new technology or even simple exhaustion, attrition—is always a toss-up.  Really, it's usually a cascading combination of several of these elements.  Thus, the role of a high-ranking officer is either to be everywhere at once, aware of any and all developments, or else to cultivate a trusted and well-organized command network that can be everywhere at once for him.  Anakin covers his bases and just kind of tries for both, which means he's never as good as he could be at either, but he usually gets the job done, and Rex, Ahsoka, the officers, the ARCs, and the 501st in general pick up his slack when he falls short.

Ultimately, this particular day’s battle is won through a combination of those smaller Republic victories and the large-scale exhaustion of Dooku’s attacking force.  It's an amazing victory just looking at the numbers, a testament to Obi-Wan and Cody’s skill at taking advantage of their defensive position as well as the incredible discipline and cohesion of the clones in general, and the creativity of the 501st in particular.

It also couldn't come a moment too soon.  It's 1400 standard when they’re finally, officially, in mopping-up-the-rest-of-the-clankers mode.  Most of their forces have been fighting for nine straight hours with no real breaks—the regulation ten-minute spells don't do much even when they can afford them.  It's been a long, hard, bloody, miserable day, even if Gamorr’s sun is still high and merciless overhead, and they don't even have the official casualty counts yet.  Anakin thinks it's no more than sixty.  He hopes.  Ahsoka, Rex, and a decent-sized squad are sweeping the woods for stragglers.  Leaving Obi-Wan, and Cody to handle the final few squads of demoralized droids in the south valley itself, Anakin jogs back toward the medical compound to get a report on the damage.  The streets of the still-nameless city are nearly empty again, with almost their entire five-hundred-man force having ultimately mobilized to repel Dooku’s overwhelming numbers.  It makes Anakin’s stomach churn with uneasiness, though maybe that's all the calories he spent without eating.  His head pounds.  His feet are dull blocks of pain.  But at least, for now, it's over.

“ General!   General Skywalker!  Sir!!”

The panic in the voice, in the Force, jolts him out of the daze he hadn't even realized he'd fallen into—stupid, suicidally stupid.  He searches wildly for the source of that familiar voice.

The CT who shouted is sprinting towards him down the street he was about to turn up, the street leading to the medical complex.  “What happened?” Anakin barks, pushing himself into a limping jog.

“The fucking—” The guy turns around to jog alongside Anakin as they meet, but has to pause to catch his breath.  “The fucking triage zone, they raided it.  They took three of the medics and the Jedi tubies.”

/B/

It's like an ice bath.

“Ahsoka?!” he asks frantically, illogically.

“No!”  The clone actually takes a step back at the look on his face.  “No, just the younglings with the Bothan Jedi.”

Anakin’s shoulders sag slightly in un-Jedi-like relief and he slows, but no.  This is still a crisis.  How the fuck did the Seppies get in?!  “Okay, so they'll be in the camp.  We’ll counter—”

The clone lurches forward to grab his arm.  “Wait, sir, you're misunderstanding! It wasn't the droids, it was the locals!”

Anakin’s brain shorts out, reboots.  “From the houses?”

“No, some sort of militia, came up from underground, they were—it's bad.  Commander Kallist went after them.”

“Fuck.  Fuck, okay.  Report everything to Rex, tell him to send reinforcements after me only once our position is fully secure.  Obi-Wan’s in command here.  Underground?”

“Tunnels.  That way, sir, you can't miss it.”  The guy is already radio-ing Rex as Anakin takes off in the direction he’s pointing; good man.

What the fuck.  It was over.  It was over.  He’s so tired.  Anakin manages to push his exhausted jog into a limping run by sheer force of will.

The entrance to the tunnel is a few blocks west, in the middle of the road.  It’s a hole in the ground that looks like it was blasted open, with room for maybe four men to pull themselves out at once.  This is a rocky patch more than a sandy patch (thank the Force), but clouds of dust are still drifting in the air.  He coughs into his sleeve as he skids to a hall at the mouth, then jumps down into partial gloom.

He falls much farther than he expected, and the impact jars him painfully, dropping him to his hands and knees.  The tunnel must be fifteen feet deep here, and it slopes downward both ways.  This is clearly a preexisting tunnel, three yards across, reinforced by metallic beams and extending unlit in both directions.  The dusty floor conveniently shows a muddle of bootprints leading off to Anakin’s right.  At least this part’s easy, then.

He makes it about five steps in that direction before the Force blares a warning, and he nearly trips over his own feet trying to avoid a seemingly innocent patch of ground that glows, beneath the surface of things, with the residue of malice.  Who the kriff mines their own escape tunnel?

He backtracks to directly beneath the hole, calls up a warning to the CT nervously peering down at him with his helmet off, buzz cut regulation (clearly a shiny).  But after that, well, there's still only one way forward.  His blue blade throws wild shadows across the walls as he jogs into darkness.

/B/

Knight Kallist is sitting against the wall of the tunnel when he finds her ten or so minutes later, one hand clutching at a hole in her gut.  The littlest one, the human, is crouched wide-eyed beside her.  She looks exhausted in the green light of her saber, but manages a polite Bothan smile when she sees him, concealing her teeth.  “Knight Skywalker.  Perfect.  I could use an engineer.”

He follows her gaze down the tunnel to where Padawan Woto’e stands, unnaturally still.  Ah.

There’s a pressure plate beneath his left foot.

It’s well disguised against the sandy ground, but visible because of how deeply it’s depressed; Zabraks must have unusually high body mass.  Not one to waste time, he kneels next to the kid and lowers his head almost to the floor, his loose hair brushing through the grit below him.  His lightsaber makes for an awkward flashlight, in that he has to be careful not to accidentally burn or cut Padawan Woto’e’s bright red feet.  Very carefully, he uses his mechanical hand to scoop out two inches or so of dirt on all sides of the circular plate, painstakingly brushing and blowing off the last few handfuls of dirt in order to expose the mechanics underneath the plate itself.

He spots the explosive itself immediately: It’s an ugly thing, very basic, jury-rigged out of a concussive grenade and a little rusted box that probably contains shrapnel of some flavor.  He doesn't see a trigger mechanism yet, though, so he makes another army-crawling circle around the plate.  The dense mess of dirt, rust, and wires doesn't look any prettier in the blue light of his ‘saber.  “Where are the three medics?” he asks the other knight as he inches along.  “I thought they were taken with the younglings?”

“They were.  One of them was killed in the initial clash, but I freed the other two from the raiding party that took them.  Woto’e and I were able to lift them both out through a weak point in the tunnel ceiling before a collapse cut us off from that exit.  We were searching for another when this new obstacle arose.”

So the medics are safe, probably; better than he had hoped, when he saw her alone with the younglings.  He grunts acknowledgment and continues searching, brushing off a little more grit with Force-guided swipes of his organic hand, glove abandoned for a defter touch.  Squinting against the gloom, he brings his ‘saber just a little bit closer.

There it is: The moment the spring-supported plate pops back up to floor level, those two stripped, hooked-together wires tucked toward the middle of the plate will disconnect, interrupting the circuit wired into the grenade.  It's a miracle they didn't disconnect when the plate first depressed—or really, probably the result of Padawan Woto’e sensing danger too late and, on instinct, infinitesimally adjusting where his weight fell as he stepped on it.

If he had tools on him, this would be a walk in the moisture market, just holding the bottom wire in place against the upper wire as the plate slithered back into resting position.  Without anything remotely similar to the long, thin, insulated clamps he uses for adjusting hard-to-reach wiring, he'll have to use the Force with hairsbreadth precision.  And precision has never been his strong suit.

He winces.  “Knight Kallist, any chance you've got a 0.3-centimeter, bendable Kathichick clamp?  Or else you're really, really good at airborne bead exercises?”

He can feel her apprehension spike in the Force, beneath the thick haze of exhaustion and suppressed fear choking the confined space.  “I have some skill with the latter, but I will need your help to come close enough to see.  I…can no longer feel my legs.”

As always, the stroke of luck comes with its own problems.  Anakin pushes himself up slowly, careful of vibrations through the ground, and paces over to her.  “Lucky shot?”

She grimaces.  “Not exactly.  We found out why this place is known for the brutality of its warfare.”  She shifts her hand, and dark blood oozes further down her front.  The human youngling, who has thus far remained so silent as to become shockingly forgettable, makes a small, choked noise in the back of their throat.  “Slugthrowers.  Melted a bit, but went straight through my saber.”

Ah.

Anakin has the sudden, clear premonition that saving her padawan will be one of Knight Kallist’s last acts.

He grips her under the armpits and starts dragging her backward, feeling her pain spike and bloom where their Force presences intertwine.  She bites her lip and makes no sound.  Padawan Woto’e stares at her, wide-eyed, his whole upper body racked with fine tremors as he fights to hold himself still.  “Master?” he says hesitantly in a hoarse, oddly flute-like voice.  It's actually the first thing Anakin has heard him say; he wasn't sure he could communicate audibly before.

“Do not worry, Woto’e, your old master is not so entirely out of tricks,” Kallist says in a soft voice as he sets her down by Woto’e’s foot so she can see the wires, but the strain in her voice betrays her act.  “Just keep still, youngling.”

“You're not old,” says Woto’e, even more quietly.  His voice gives out at the end, slipping out of the audible register he’s apparently been forcing it down into.  He hasn't met many Zabraks besides Maul, but he's never heard of them communicating supersonically, like Woto’e appears to; the kid must be a hybrid of some sort.  Makes sense that he was chosen by a Bothan, if he communicates outside galaxy-standard vocal registers.

“Hush, padawan,” Kallist says absently, lowering herself gingerly on her side.  “Alright, Knight Skywalker.  What am I looking for?”

Anakin gets back down on his stomach next to her and points.  “You see those two wires, hooked together?  …Are you sure you're steady enough for this?”

She huffs a laugh and meets his eyes.  “Somehow, I have never felt steadier.”

It's true, he realizes with surprise: He can feel her new calm in the Force, her acceptance.  She knows she's dead as much as he does, and she’s—

He’s not sure he's ever understood, as he does then, what exactly the Light has to offer.

It’s…breathtaking.

In the Force, her absolute certainty meets her padawan’s absolute trust.  Their convictions braid together in the space between them to form an unbreakable cord.  Anakin intended, before this, to cushion her with strength in the Force, to help numb her pain or something, but now he's almost afraid to intervene, to interrupt their perfect focus.

“Woto’e,” she says serenely, “you may lift your foot, slowly.  I will not let you fall.”

Ever so slowly, her padawan obeys.

Ever so slowly, the plate follows his foot upward, until—

It slots back into its upright position with a quiet snick.  Padawan Woto’e does not fall.

/B/

Certainly, there is a moment of relief.  A moment of rejoicing, one might imagine.  Perhaps, between master and padawan, there is even a hug.

And then Knight Kallist’s ear twitches.  A half-second later, Anakin hears it too, far in the distance but becoming ever-so-slightly louder as he listens.

Boom.  Boom.  Boom.  

His heart skips a beat.

Knight Kallist meets his eyes, and a moment of perfect understanding passes between them.  “Go,” she says.

Scrambling to his feet, Anakin tosses the youngling over his left shoulder like a sack of rice.  The youngling lets out a surprised squeak as he then turns to Padawan Woto’e, who is standing over his master, unmoving.  “Come on, kid,” Anakin says.  When the kid doesn't respond, he seizes him too, bending to brace him against his shoulder and then lifting him off his feet as he breaks into a shambling run.

It takes a shocked moment for Woto’e to respond, and then he immediately starts fighting, twisting and kicking until Anakin almost drops him.  “No!  No!  Master!!”

Anakin grunts as a sharp knee hits him in the stomach, pushing himself to sprint under the combined 150-pound load.  “She's already gone!” Anakin yells over the ultra-high-pitched keening sound the preteen is making directly into his right ear, refusing to look back to where he can feel the other Jedi still sitting on the ground, and, further behind, thousands of tons of dirt and rock setting off landmine after landmine in a chain reaction rippling down the simple tunnel system.  Something in his right knee twinges, and he almost lurches into the wall as he feels it start to give.  “Padawan, I need you to run!  She wants you to run!”

He isn't sure if it's his words that do it, or Knight Kallist sends something over the training bond, or if it’s just that turning a corner finally obscures his master from sight, but after another moment Woto’e stops fighting.  Anakin carries the padawan for a few more steps and then drops him as gracefully as he can on his feet, catching his wrist to get him running even as he stumbles.  It takes a few steps of awkward dragging, and the kid is openly sobbing, but finally Woto’e settles into a Force-enhanced run beside him.   Behind them, in a deadly reversal of the moment of elation from this morning, the concussive roar of the earth becomes louder and louder.

For five minutes, there is nothing in the world but rock walls and dirt floors streaking past him, the Force guiding them both around landmines, and the weight on his shoulder.  The upward slope of their course quickly becomes its own torture.  Anakin struggles to distinguish the rockfall behind them from the beating of his own heart; both have become deafening.  Then Woto’e stumbles again, and he feels the psychic backlash as a training bond breaks, Kallist’s light snuffed out behind them.  The padawan lets out an eardrum-shattering high-pitched wail but only runs faster, bending his horned head down like a charging bantha bull under the weight of his grief.  No matter how fast they run, the echoing roar keeps getting louder.

A blast of air hits him in the back, almost knocking him over.  This stale wind—the second warning.  Fucking hells.  But there’s light up ahead.  A patch of dim light: the hole he came in through.

The noise is deafening now.  The wind speeds them on, grains of sand and then small rocks beginning to hit them in the back as they push their legs ever faster.  That blurry circle of light is nearing.  But he thinks if he turned around now he’d see the vortex in the dark behind them, and that second lost to turning would mean the end for him, like the Nabooian gorgon that kills when seen.  Beside him, Woto’e is slowing; Anakin seizes him by one skinny wrist without looking and drags him along once again.

Ten yards.  Eight yards.  The breath of the krayt dries the sweat on his neck.

Ten feet.  Almost there.  They skid to a stop.  Padawan Woto’e, thank the Rain Bringer and every Force deity out there, jumps for it without prompting.  They're going to make it with seconds to spare.

And then, just as Anakin is tensing to jump himself, the Force-damned twelve-year-old just misses the lip of the hole, scrambling at the rim as he starts to fall back down.

Fuck.

For the thousandth time today, Anakin’s own death screams through him in the Force.  The dragon in the darkness surges forward to swallow him.

He makes a call.

Instead of jumping himself, Anakin gets both hands around the limp humanoid youngling’s ribs and hurls them, like a shot-put, toward the hole fifteen feet above.  He distantly reflects that if not for the circumstances, Ahsoka would probably find this image hilarious.  The shocked kid reaches their zenith just as Woto’e loses his grip and begins to fall in earnest, and Anakin shoves them both from beneath with the Force.  This sends them flying free at an angle that will land them a solid distance away from the tunnel, and also significantly widens the hole.  Then he jumps for it himself.

He’s still gonna make it.  The light looms close.

And then (though he won't figure this out until much later) the landmine nearest to this entrance—the one he almost stepped on when he first dropped in—is set off prematurely by the vibrations, the footsteps of the approaching krayt, and everything becomes nothing in an instant.

/B/

From the Records of the Founding of the Aurelian Reform Sith Order, Server 12F, Datalog 35790655.41, Entry 131/500, voice call, auto-transcript.

12/86, 10 BBY

AS: This whole Darth thing.  Darth this, Darth that.  It sounds stupid.  I don't need to give myself a pithy little codename to show I mean business, much less put Darth in front of it.  What does that even mean?

BO: Well it just means Lord, actually.

AS: Really?  [pause]  Well, that’s another thing, though—walking around declaring yourself a lord?  It’s ridiculous!  Lord of what, exactly?

BO: Lord of the [pause] Sith, I would imagine?

AS: Yeah, but that's, you know, like three people max at any given moment, and chances are they’re all calling themselves lords.  I really think we can just ditch that entirely.

BO: Yes, I see your point.  Alright, next on the list: I see Ahsoka wrote [begin quote] do we need to make our own lightsaber styles or can we plagiarize?  [end quote]

BO: I don't.  [pause]  Um.  [extended pause]

AS: [ext. pause] I mean, is it really [emph.] plagiarism?

BO: I mean.

AS: Like can they sue us for it?

BO: [ext. pause]

Chapter Text

Anakin hurts.  The world is spinning, even though he's—yes, laying down, and when he takes a deep breath something twinges and sends tangy warmth bubbling up into his airways.  He tries to speak and coughs up liquid.

A familiar voice, overlapping itself as awareness slips sideways.  “Medic!  We need a medic in here!”  Sharp pain dulls, head throbbing.  Blurred figures in armor, lights gather near, one brighter than the rest—his father, his brother?  No—the training bond twinges and constricts—good, Ahsoka will be able to stay focused.  There is a weight on his legs, and then there isn't—sweet relief.  So Anakin drifts for a minute, lets the world swim around him, only to startle when he sees a clone unsheath a hypospray with green labeling.  He knows the green, the green is—

Vision sharpens.  Anakin struggles to speak around warm liquid and a heavy tongue.  “Please, ple—no, no, Obi-Wan, I’m lucid, I’m lu—l, luse—you—

“Clearly you’re not lucid, dear one, because if you were you’d never admit that you don’t want it,”  Obi-Wan says quietly.  He attempts a light tone, but he looks so sad, why does he…?

—no, no, they’re going to find it, the crevice between bone and gristle deep in the meat of his left thigh and they’ll fill it, they’ll fill it—

Anakin comes within a hair’s breadth of fighting them in earnest.  Armored gloves catch at his shoulders to hold him down and he thrashes and fights and in the back of his mind sees how he could splatter them like fireworks at a glance, spread them like pressed flowers between two dimensions because Anakin is not a drop of water in the ocean, Anakin is a bomb beneath the skin of the world.  Tug the right tendons and he could see the muscles twitch, see them flicked off undramatically like insects from the back of a bantha—but there is Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan, father and brother, and he looks so sad, who died?  Cody?  (Flicked off like insects, he remembers Geonosis, how they crackled.)  I have been a stranger in my own land all my life; the blasphemy of my birth has followed me….

/B/

The charge in the air passes away like a summer breeze, and the prey instinct in Obi-Wan’s gut begins to settle as his apprentice’s lurid yellow eyes roll back in his head.  But not the fear.  Never the fear, at times like this.

The medics quickly take things in hand, shouting at each other as they attempt to stabilize him on the run.  Then the gurney goes the way of all the others, pushed with ruthless efficiency toward the half-destroyed infirmary.  Mustering possibly the greatest amount of self-control he has exerted in his entire monastic life, Obi-Wan remains where he is.

A dark shape on the ground catches his eye, sticking out of the rubble they pulled his padawan from.  Slowly, ever so slowly, he bends to pull it free.

It’s Anakin’s ridiculous sun-goggles. One lens is completely missing; the other is a mess of jagged shards.

A moment later, he senses a grim assessment directed at him in the Force, and looks up to meet Captain Rex’s eyes, hidden as they are behind his visor.  “They've just gotten him to surgery.  As stable as he could be,” Rex reports.  Ah.  So more than a moment has passed, a good deal more.  He needs to get ahold of himself.  He needs to be better.

“That's…good.  Thank you for telling me, captain.”  Obi-Wan hopes someone has told Ahsoka, then looks around and realizes Ahsoka is nowhere to be seen.  His heartbeat jumps again.

Rex is still standing in front of him.  Rex hasn't replied, Obi-Wan realizes with a start, just keeps staring at him steadily.  There’s a question there, and a warning.  A hint, buried beneath years of conditioning, of a threat.

Oh.  “I was aware, Captain,” Obi-Wan offers tiredly.  He’s hit with a burst of inappropriate, slightly hysterical amusement.  “I could hardly have missed it by this point, but he told me over our leave.  We will have to find some replacement for these heinous sun-goggles of his.”

Rex watches him in silence for a moment longer.  He nods, once.  And then he’s gone, already yelling orders at the nearest group of confused shinies.

Obi-Wan should really be doing that too.  He gives himself a mental shake, then a physical one, which jars his ribs unpleasantly and thereby does an admirable job of shocking him back into focus.  His men need him now.  He’s a Jedi Master.  He can release these feelings into the Force, or at least shove them down deep for a few hours before he can examine them, name them, and overwrite them with cold, calm logic.

He manages for two hours before Cody gives him a look and spells him for the final touches.  Without his conscious permission, he finds himself in the (hastily repaired) medical tent, where Anakin is out of surgery and lying on a tarp on a shaded patch of ground crowded with other men on tarps—they’ve long since run out of cots.  Obi-Wan experiences a moment of intense relief when he sees him, and another when he realizes Anakin is in the section for patients who aren't expected to be in immediate danger anytime soon—stable patients.  Ahsoka sits next to him, doing something on a datapad with her whole left hand and forearm wrapped in thick bandages.  She nods politely when she sees him, dirty-faced and old behind the eyes.  She’s clearly exhausted.

With effort, he lowers himself to sit cross-legged on the ground, leans back on his hands when the pain in his ribs spikes.  Oh, stars, he's never going to be able to stand up again.  It’s delicious to be off his feet.

Anakin’s face is pale and still, smeared with dirt that he has to resist the urge to brush off.  His forehead is bandaged and his face is badly scraped around the deepening bruises of a broken nose.  There’s a thin blanket covering him below the chest and an IV in his arm, the level in the bag dangerously low—rationing, Obi-Wan concludes with a start.  Ahsoka appears to have fallen asleep sitting up.  The medical tent—tent complex, really—bustles with activity, but this lukewarm, shaded corner is relatively quiet.  

With a sigh, feeling a little detached from himself due to the sudden drop in adrenaline, Obi-Wan lets his mind slip back to the moment of impact.

What surprised him was not the fact that Anakin risked his life to save near-strangers—that’s so far from surprising that it only occurred to Obi-Wan afterwards that it should have been, now.  Anakin has never had the most robust sense of empathy in the world, but he has a very strong sense of justice.  Actually, the only surprising thing that happened today was that charge in the air, and the fact that it dissipated.

Obi-Wan has felt that charge a few times in his life.  Twice when Anakin was small, and Obi-Wan woke him from a screaming nightmare.  Once when Anakin was fifteen and a ship crash on a mission left him badly concussed.  And once, as the shock began setting in after Anakin lost his hand.  On all of these occasions, Obi-Wan stood in a room with his tiny or medium-sized padawan and abruptly knew what it was to be a small fish, feeling the water ripple as something unfathomably immense glides past you in the dark.  Became aware, with unsettling clarity, that he was very, very close to death.

And, at the risk of sounding conceited, he attributed his survival in all of those instances to the excellence of Anakin’s Jedi training.  To the Light, and all that comes with it.  Obi-Wan’s not much of a teacher, but the Light makes up for many deficits in those who serve it.

Qui-Gon never talked about his master.  Neither did Yoda or Jocasta Nu, or really any of the old masters who fought alongside Dooku for decades.  But that certainly didn't stop a curious padawan from looking, and there has never been a Knight since the founding of the modern Order who left no traces in the Order’s extensive records.  Dooku before his Fall was…in some ways the same, but in many ways very different.  There was a curiosity in his mission reports, an edge of gentleness to the way he referenced his few friends and his padawans, that felt completely at odds with the mass murderer Obi-Wan later met on the battlefield.  Dooku became…unrecognizable, after his Fall.  That was why Jedi had such horror of Falling, a slightly younger knight once concluded as the flames of war spread across an unprepared galaxy—not just because Sith perpetrated horrors against the universe, but because it was a kind of death much worse than death itself.  An erasure of the soul, leaving only a malignant husk behind: a tumor, where a person had been.

But now Obi-Wan reconsiders.  Dooku’s Fall wasn't exactly flipping a switch.  Dooku’s mission reports provide ample reason for him to distrust the Jedi or the Republic.  On some of these missions, if one read between the lines, Dooku saw horrific things and experienced worse.  He did things by the book and saw terrible consequences; he did terrible things because they were demanded of him.  Multiple times, in his younger Knighted days, he formally registered complaints in strong terms because his orders called for him to step aside in the face of cruelty, suffering, or insidious corruption.  These complaints were logged, sometimes briefly debated, and now linger, silent, in the archive they were dismissed to.

Obi-Wan always thought of these experiences as factors leading to his Fall.  He never considered whether they might also have determined his behavior afterwards—not just his betrayal of the Republic, but also the Dark methods he employed to accomplish it.  Never considered that Darkness and cruelty, or Darkness and madness, or Darkness and a twisted idealism, could be…simultaneous, perhaps interwoven, but ultimately separate threads in a personality.

Anakin is Anakin.  Anakin, for all Obi-Wan’s sometimes exhausting efforts, has always categorically refused to be anything but.

Obi-Wan needs to meditate on this.  He needs time.  Oh, Force, let there be time.

He catches a medic as he rushes by, feeling a little guilty for it but needing to know.  “Excuse me.  How long until General Skywalker will be back on his feet, do you know?”

He’s not expecting a hopeful answer.  Weeks, he’s thinking.  Perhaps a month.  Perhaps more.

He’s not expecting the look that the medic gives him as he pauses, and the feelings of shock/awkward/muted distress that reverberate through the Force.  “Um.  Sir….”

The worry in his stomach spikes, working its way up toward a full-on panic.  “Spit it out, trooper,” he clips out, and the man cringes back in the Force at his tone.

Ahsoka saves the poor shiny the trouble, apparently roused by the tension in the room.  “He’s not in immediate danger, Master, but the damage to his legs is extensive, especially his right foot and ankle.  The bones there are shattered.”  She takes a breath and adds, very quietly, “They're considering amputation.”

The shiny medic nods, regret staining the Force wine-purple with the scent of burning oil.  “If we had advanced equipment, we would set the breaks surgically in a pressure chamber, drop him in bacta, have him starting physical therapy in a month or so.  Without it, the bone shards are a threat to his major blood vessels.  He could sever one of his tibial arteries by moving wrong, sir.  And then….”

“Yes, I understand.”

The shiny bustles on to other patients.  Ahsoka falls asleep sitting up again.  And Obi-Wan sits there, trying and failing to think of something helpful to do or say or even think.

Well, a darkly amused corner of Obi-Wan’s brain points out, at least he’ll be easier to keep up with now.

/B/

Anakin wakes up disoriented.

A moment later, the pain in his chest hits him, and he grits his teeth around a scream.  It hurts to breathe.  Oh, Force, it hurts to breathe.

There’s a flurry of motion at his side, and he's out again.

When he next wakes up, it hurts significantly less to breathe, but he's too aware, after a moment of working himself up to consciousness, to think he’s on the really good meds.  He glances around, and even that small movement of his head sets his right side on fire.  His back is deeply unhappy with him—burned, maybe?—and he has to breathe carefully around the feeling of the blanket resting on his right hip especially, which is hard with several clearly cracked ribs.  He knows what massive dermal abrasion feels like.

It’s another moment before he recognizes that that orange-and-white shape to his right is Ahsoka, wrapped in a liberal amount of bandages.  He tries to speak to her, and then his body seizes up in another wave of pain when his throat doesn't want to cooperate.  He carefully gathers saliva in his mouth, swallows to moisten his throat, and tries again.  “Snips,” he manages in a hoarse whisper.

She startles visibly and in the Force, having been staring off toward the door of the medical tent with her arms wrapped around her knees.  “Master!  You’re awake!”

“Barely,” he admits.  “...Water?”

“Kriff, yes, of course!” she rushes out all in a breath, scrambling to grab something behind her.  It’s her canteen, and he manages to drink a few sips, holding one side with his organic arm while she holds the other.  It doesn't exactly solve everything, but he feels a little better than after the couple of occasions on which he’s been tortured, so.

Ahsoka is shielding pretty well, but he can sense a well of roiling emotions through the bond.  “You alright?” he asks her, and then the full weight of their situation returns to him.  “Fuck.  Status report?”

“Holding steady.  Master Plo and his men are doing well against Dooku in space and in the air, and they managed to land and launch a ground attack from the west starting yesterday morning.  Between us, we’ve probably taken out two thirds of Dooku’s total land troops—mostly us in the huge battle day before yesterday, you've been asleep a day and a half—and forced him to shift his camp a lot further away.  The shields are holding.  The Gamorrean forces haven't reappeared since the tunnel system collapsed.  Our best guess, from what we’ve seen and what we’ve gotten out of a few locals who Obi-Wan, ah, forced the issue with, is that outright attacks or defense on the battlefield aren't really a thing here.  Their idea of warfare is entirely guerrilla, and even more cautious than you'd see on, like, Utapau; it’s about waiting for a weak point for infiltration and ritual hostage-taking.  Now that we've fought off their first attempt, we’re thinking it's gonna be awhile before they try again, and hopefully we’ll be gone by then.  They’re not a huge threat to a well-prepared force.  Those slug-throwers are nasty, though.”  She wrinkles her nose, undermining her professional mission-report tone.  “Cowardly weapon.”

Anakin huffs humorlessly.  “A weapon is a weapon, I guess.  Not cowardly if it works.  Did you—”  He stops, swallows, and she helps him take another drink before he can continue.  “Did you check any tunnels that are still there?”

“There, uh.  There aren't any.  Not under the city, at least.  Got a couple fewer buildings, too.”

He nods as much as he can, digesting that.  “ETA?”

Luckily, she understands what he means, because he doesn't think he can talk much longer.  His whole right side is throbbing steadily now, and the pain in his ribs is mounting even as his energy quickly drains.  “We think we’ll have them beat within two days now.  Maybe earlier.”

“Wizard,” Anakin sighs, not noticing Ahsoka’s giggle.  “Think I’m gonna pass out.  ‘nything else I should know?”

Ahsoka goes cold in the Force, which is almost enough to startle him into wakefulness again.  “...’Soka?”

Her lips thin.  Almost against her will, her eyes dart toward the foot of the bed.  Toward his right leg.  Which he can't feel.

Oh.  Oh.

His last thought before he passes out again is: Wow, this feels familiar.

/B/

The next few days are an…adjustment.

The medics are kind enough to straighten out his assumption as soon as he wakes up again.  He hasn't lost the foot, not yet.  But it's a possibility.  He’s got pins shoved into his right leg, completely numbing his nerves and paralyzing the muscle, from the lower thigh down, to keep him from accidentally cutting through his own major blood vessels (thank the Force for Kix’s interest in obscure medical technologies).  He certainly won't be walking on his own power until long after they've left Gamorr.  The leg won't even bear his weight, Kix assures him with a serious warning in his tone.  Regardless of how bad the breaks really are, regardless of how long they can hold out before he either bleeds too much internally or the bones heal wrong and they have to take a lightsaber to his calf while he watches, Anakin is grounded for the foreseeable future.

The thing is, Anakin doesn't have a lot of time to process how he feels about potentially losing a crucial portion of his body, again, because he’s still a general in a city under siege.  As soon as he’s conscious more often than he isn't, Rex resumes reporting to him for any medium-term strategy decisions that are above his command level, and First Lieutenant Flounder reports to him for high-level decisions about siege defenses and camp administration, and Kix shamelessly takes advantage of his being stuck in the medical tent to pester him about resource allocation and better procedures for said medical tent.  This means that he needs to remain up-to-date on a wide variety of developments, which means that he spends most of his time bugging people into tracking down other people who can give him the information he needs to solve various problems, and the rest of his time filling out flimsiwork.

The main bright spot is Ahsoka, who spends most of her spare time in the med tent with him or Echo (who took a blaster bolt right through the chink in the armor on his upper right thigh, an injury his brothers will not stop razzing him for, though it's not like he really got shot in the ass).  She’s hovering, but since she spends most of the time roping the other injured men into conversation instead of just him, it's comparatively unobtrusive.  Plus, she's gotten good at sensing any downturn in his mood and making herself scarce.  (When did she learn that?)  Something still clenches deep in his chest at the idea of her seeing him so weak, so useless, but it's not like she hasn't seen him injured before.  He practices feeling that aversion, acknowledging it, and then letting it pass so that he can just be happy to see her.

Obi-Wan, by contrast, is never around, which Anakin has decided to think of as a good thing.  Totally.  There were a few days after Anakin first lost his hand where Obi-Wan was unbearable, so beside himself with worry and so distrustful of Anakin’s capabilities that he would barely even let Anakin eat without hovering.  This drove nineteen-year-old Anakin so incandescently up the wall that it culminated in him very nearly murdering his master with a pair of chopsticks, and instead screaming him out of the room so loudly and with such a variety of profanities that Obi-Wan actually fled to sleep in Master Vos’ apartments for three days.  He’s glad his men are reacting better, though really, he shouldn't have expected anything less of the 501st—practically every man in the army knows a brother who’s lost a limb, and they're used to thinking of him as more of an occasionally embarrassing force of nature than anything stoppable by something so small as a potential amputation.  On the other hand (ha), he’s still incredibly tired and exceedingly injured even without the whole foot thing, and he thinks he’d really like more than a few moments snatched between sleeping and waking to figure out how he feels about all this, and what he’s going to have to do about it going forward.

When he does get a moment to think about it, he thinks there are, ironically, two hands about the whole “been there, done that” aspect too.  On one hand, he knows now what he wasn't sure of the first time: He can get through this, overcome it.  He’s done it before.  It was one of the most difficult challenges he’d ever faced in his life up to that point: wading through days of depression and rage and self-hatred because he'd been training to become stronger since he was nine, and wishing for it much longer, and now the body he’d put so much time into was oddly balanced and struggled with the stupidest things.  Especially so soon after losing his mother, he found himself shattering under the intense waves of frustration and grief that rolled over him every time he forgot and tried to accomplish some simple task with his left hand, and later, a kind of manic paranoia at his own vulnerability whenever he wasn't wearing the prosthetic.

On the other hand, having dealt with losing a limb before means he knows exactly how hard it is.  He remembers how many things he had to learn to adjust for, big and small, and how they kept coming up.  Obi-Wan’s temporary exile from their apartments was really a great opportunity for him to start figuring out basic workarounds for some of the more embarrassing everyday tasks complicated by losing a hand.

But a foot is very different from a hand, just as his non-dominant left hand would have been different from his dominant right; he can dwell on it all he wants, but realistically, there's no way he can predict everything he'd have to adjust for if he lost the foot.  It would be a lot of things.  Better not to think about it at all.

And when he really lets himself consider it, it's not as if he ever really overcame the loss of his hand.  Fuck, he still has nightmares sometimes about that fight, about Ahsoka or Obi-Wan taking his place in that fight.  The phantom itches are infrequent but drive him absolutely insane when they do crop up, and he still struggles with basic tasks like opening jars whenever he takes the prosthetic off, still humiliates himself knocking glasses off of Padme’s counter when he reaches for them without thinking, because he’s not nearly practiced enough with his workarounds.  And that's because he’s still wearing his prosthetic hand over far longer periods of time than the doctor recommends, though it's hard to tell how much of that is him and how much is just the times they live in.  Another way in which he has trouble telling where he ends and the war begins, these days.

So in conclusion, it's better not to think about it.  It's just a hypothetical, anyway; it's entirely possible that Master Plo will break the siege tomorrow, or the next day, and there will be bacta on the ship they're evacuated to, and a quick trip to surgery, one vacuum chamber, and a short bacta dunk later he’ll be—not good as new, but ready to start physical therapy and be battlefield-ready again within the month.  He's definitely lost some functionality due to nerve damage, but it might not be too much; it might be minor enough to simply adjust his movements for, or they might be able to salvage it fully with synthnerves in a secondary surgery.  He knows the Republic would pay for that, even if the Temple wouldn’t; he's made himself too valuable to the war effort for them to do anything less, for all that they'd undoubtedly hem and haw about it.  That's more than almost any other soldier could say.

The rest of their stranding on Gamorr passes in this strange, anticlimactic way for Anakin: sleeping too much, filling out flimsiwork, strategizing, enduring uncomfortable medical checkups with bad grace, and chatting with his padawan and his men about their plans for after the war ends, or their opinions on blue versus green milk.  He’s hungry and in pain and misses the relative privacy of his and Ahsoka’s own tent (and, okay, he's pretty miffed at Obi-Wan), but it's nowhere near the series of low points he’s experienced over most of the previous two weeks.  There are no more all-out assaults from Dooku; he doesn't have the numbers for that to yield any chance of success anymore, and he knows it.  Any day now, Plo Koon’s forces are going to break the blockade completely and evacuate all Republic forces to a fully equipped, fairly well-supplied star destroyer.

It’s weird.  Fifty-three men are dead and burnt to ash, and even that's better than they ever could have expected.  Things are weirdly easy, here at the end.

It's enough to set his teeth on edge.

/B/

The other shoe drops the night Plo Koon accepts Dooku’s bridge commander’s surrender, four days after the tunnel explosion.  Dooku isn’t up there to surrender for himself.  There is a reason for this.

Anakin startles awake to the Force’s screaming-acid-rotten-eggs warning.  As the highest-priority long-term patient, he’s been moved to a a tarp near one of the medical tent’s two main door flaps for easy access, which means he has a great view of a burning red line igniting on the other side of the flap before he's dragged under it at high speed.  One could think of any number of things Anakin should be considering at this moment, starting with how to break the uncomfortably tight Force grip on his neck and shoulders and followed by trying to figure out how the hell Dooku got through fifteen layers of security and how many clones he killed to do it—but in the moment it's hard to think about anything except the burning pain in his back and right hip, which is so overwhelming that he manages to break the Force hold purely on instinct, shove himself up on his left side without the use of his legs, and be sick on the ground repeatedly without actually becoming conscious of any of these actions.

When the black spots fade from his vision enough to see, he searches hastily through the darkness and blurred vision for that red line.  Dooku is, surprisingly, about ten yards away, picking himself up from behind a hillock of rubble with what Anakin hopes is a lot of joint pain.  His saber stains his dark robes wine-red as he retrieves it.  Anakin grits his teeth and tries to shove himself to his feet, but the wave of blinding pain that resurges with the attempt is nearly as incapacitating as the remaining needles still paralyzing the major muscle groups in his right leg.  He falls back with a wheezing gasp.  It is humiliating.

Dooku is on his feet now and fast approaching.  Anakin mentally pings Obi-Wan over the bond, but he must be asleep, there’s no response.  There's no way he's calling for Ahsoka.  He could openly yell for help, but beyond the way his pride rebels, he would just get a lot of men killed and be killed himself before they could take up deflection-avoidant sniping positions.  Instead, he activates the silent SOS on his wrist comm with the touch of a button.  Now he just has to survive until Rex or someone else can attempt to take a Sith lord by surprise, so at least two minutes.  Fuck, fuck, fuck, he’s missing a foot, where's his saber, what the fuck is he supposed to do—

He’s scrambled.  Not too scrambled to make an attempt to Force push Dooku as hard as he can, but Dooku is braced physically and metaphysically this time and only sways like a man in a rough wind even when Anakin changes the vector to push him from the side.  Pushing himself up onto his right elbow, Anakin makes a second attempt with lightning, but Dooku effortlessly catches the weak trickle on his lightsaber, raising a barely visible eyebrow.  Then he lowers his saber, and his face disappears back into the gloom.

“I see that still has a ways to go,” he says drily from the darkness.  “Tell me, boy, did you even bother to seek the wisdom of your forebears when you Fell, or did you believe you could carry it through on pure talent?  I assure you, the Dark Side has no room for such arrogance.”

…Anakin had kind of forgotten how irritating he finds this man.  The only good thing about Dooku’s personality is it makes him uniquely susceptible, when Plan A (Violence) fails, to Plan B (Distract).  “I have not had a lot of free time,” Anakin says through gritted teeth.  “I imagine you've been a bit busy, too, since the death of your best general.”

“Oh, you’re boasting about General Grievous.  No, he was unimportant in the grand scheme of things.  Though, I used to think the same of you,” Dooku muses, slowing his approach to a casual saunter.  Anakin never thought he'd feel insulted by someone coming to kill him slower than necessary, but hey, today has been full of surprises.  Dooku suddenly thinks he’s important?  Yes, Anakin’s one of the two best generals in the GAR, but that's never stopped Dooku from brushing him off before.

Then Dooku is standing over him, and Anakin needs to get better at precision pushing a saber in the Force real quick or he’ll be unnecessarily difficult to collect for cremation.  He braces for the slash, tries to draw out the conversation.  “You're here for me?  How did I finally manage to piss you off?”

“This is nothing personal, boy.”  The tip of Dooku’s saber drifts up to waver slightly over Anakin’s chest, and Anakin sets his teeth in a snarl.  He will not die looking up from the ground at this man.  “I just made an…unpleasant realization, reviewing the footage from the spy droid I left inside our dear departed general.  My master has plans for you that I would prefer not to come to fruition.”

What?  “Your master can stuff his plans up his wrinkly—”

“He wants to replace me,” Dooku continues slightly louder, as if he didn't say anything.  “The Rule of Two and all that.  Terribly inconvenient, but he’s something of a traditionalist, the old vulture-hawk.  And here you are, his favorite little pawn, frying a man with lightning like a fully-fledged Sith lord.  Clearly, I can't let this go any further.”

Anakin is internally reeling at the revelation that apparently his Fall was engineered, but he’s also facing imminent death, so this really isn't the time to focus on that.  Still: “You’re only killing me because of that?” he says, dredging the depths of his mind for better stalling tactics and coming up empty.  “It’s like you don't even care about the war you're days from losing.”

Dooku raises an imperious eyebrow, letting up on the lightsaber just slightly as he smirks a little.  “Yes, it really does seem that way, doesn't it.”

Anakin’s brow furrows.  “What—”

“No, enough talk.  You've always irritated me, child.  Let’s just say I’m doing this for personal reasons.”  And without further ado, he centers the point on Anakin’s gut and leans his whole weight on the saber.

Anakin’s mind—fractures, a little bit.  He seizes the hilt and the humming plasma beyond it like a dog seizing a stick, managing to catch it just as it makes contact, distantly feeling the flesh above his diaphragm sizzle and begin to melt.  The hold is so tenuous it’s like grasping for the tail of a sprinting bantha and the gossamer-thin tendrils of a Nabooian jelly-snake all at once, holding on by the skin of his teeth.  Vision wavers; sounds fade.  Dooku tries to pull the saber away to slash from a different direction, but Anakin holds on grimly.  He immediately regrets it when Dooku resumes stabbing with renewed force, an incredulous grimace twisting his lips.  He says something Anakin doesn't register.  Anakin’s grip slips for a heart-pounding millisecond, catches again.  The burning point digs ever-so-slightly deeper.

He ends up sunk so deep in the Force, putting the whole weight of his rage and indignation into pushing that burning point away, trying with the far corners of his mind to find room to push Dooku instead or the strength to roll out from under the saber but the moment he loses his focus he’ll be dead—so deep that he has no idea how much time has passed when someone deeply familiar yells, “Get away from him!” and practically tackles Dooku out of Anakin’s frame of view.

/B/

Obi-Wan does not, in fact, wake to Anakin’s prodding at the bond; after years of nightmares, he's grown far too inured to the feeling of that particular supernova presence battering against his shields in unconscious panic at night.  No, Obi-Wan wakes up thirty-one fortuitous seconds later to take a piss.  He's almost finished this delicate operation at the base of a modestly distant bush (part of the privacy screen for someone’s yard) when a half-armored shiny bursts out from behind the bush in question, forcing him to readjust his robes in a blind panic, which is the reason it takes him a moment to register what the man is saying.  “—Skywalker’s signal from the medical station, captain’s setting up to take down a Sith lord in camp!”

Obi-Wan sprints.

/B/

Anakin has to retch a few more times before his vision clears enough to really see what's going on.  The light strobes and judders, red-blue-red.  Obi-Wan and Dooku are going at it like tigerfish.  In the distance, now, he can also hear the whine of blasters, shouts—Dooku must have brought the remainder of his forces as a diversion, though apparently only he could get through the shield with any stealth.  No assassin droids with electrostaves, that's a nice change of pace.

Both fighters Force push in unison and end up blown back to opposite sides of the dueling ground, where they pause for a minute, sizing each other up.  Obi-Wan, predictably, takes the opportunity to taunt.

“You must know, even if you kill us here, you’ll end up in our exact same position when the Master Koon wins or further reinforcements arrive, both of which could happen at any moment,” he offers blithely, though Anakin can still hear the undercurrent of burning anger.  “By chasing us here, you’ve lost yourself the war.”

Dooku pauses, smirks.  “Oh, dear, yes,” he says.  “The Separatist cause, lost.  Who could have seen it coming?”

“Have you no loyalty to your constituents, my dear Count?  What a surprise.”  But Obi-Wan sounds perturbed under the sarcasm.  “But really, I’m curious.  What could prompt you to showcase such suicidally awful strategy?”

“Suffice it to say, General Kenobi, that circumstances have forced my hand.  So as much as I enjoy your attempts at conversation, I really must insist we get on with things.”  Dooku takes a quick step forward, and the two fighters collide again in a flurry of motion.

Cursing himself, his leg, Kix, and every god he’s ever heard of, Anakin does his best to drag himself out of the way of the combatants, but with them moving around so much, and Dooku actually trying to fight his way past Obi-Wan to take potshots at Anakin (what a reversal!) it's basically pointless.  Anakin burns at his own helplessness, at becoming the fucking damsel in distress stranded on the edge of the battlefield.  He just has no idea what to do; he can't Force push or zap Dooku without risking hitting Obi-Wan.  Worse still, he's an additional impediment for some of Rex’s gunmen and snipers, who can't fire on Dooku for the same reason.  And the side of his skull aches with a peculiar intensity that suggests Dooku caved to the indignity of kicking him in the head while he was sunk too deep in the Force to notice, and he can't stop coughing.  Anakin genuinely considers trying to bite Dooku’s ankles the next time he comes by.

Obi-Wan has a close call, then another.  Hes not fighting as defensively as he normally does, relying more on Ataru than Soresu.  He's losing, slowly but surely.  Anakin bites his cheek so hard that his mouth fills with blood.  At one point the duelists whirl so close that a pebble kicked up by Obi-Wan hits him in the forehead.

It is this, finally, along with the recent memory of his struggle to switch mental gears while pushing Dooku’s saber away, which gives him the idea.

Anakin looks around.  Now that there's a light source, Dooku dragged him a bit less than a hundred feet away from the medical tent, into an open area of rocky ground, something like a large intersection or shabby public square.  It’s fringed with abandoned houses and the occasional scrubby tree, behind which twenty or so of the 501st’s best snipers flicker in the Force with anticipation and fear.  And about fifteen feet away to his left, as his eyes adjust, he can just make out the thick line of rubble tracing the path of the collapsed tunnel.  Jagged angular boulders and the last standing wall of someone’s half-collapsed house stick up at odd angles like a line of rotten molars, lighter black against darker black.  He can work with this.

Reaching out with the Force, he pinpoints a shard the size of a speeder that feels easy to shift quietly.  His head swims—mild concussion?—but he clenches his jaw against it and lifts the rock smoothly into the air.  Then another, and another.  It’s like the time Ahsoka and Barriss were buried in the rubble of the exploded droid foundry, except Anakin finds that now, fueling himself with his anger and embarrassment and ice-cold determination rather than trying to focus despite his fear, he can lift far more weight more easily than he could then.

As the duel drags on fifteen seconds, twenty, more and more indistinct shapes cluster in the darkness above the center of the battlefield.  Neither duelist has noticed.

Ahsoka’s presence washes over him in the Force a moment before her hand lands on his shoulder, which blessedly keeps him from startling and dropping the rocks on Dooku and Obi-Wan both.  “Master, are you alright?” she says quietly, the curve of her face and lekku faintly illuminated in the fitful light of the clashing sabers.

Ah, and there’s the part of his plan he hadn't figured out yet, coming together.  It's a bit of a struggle to gather his thoughts to speak, an odd, lightheaded feeling coming from splitting his attention between the considerable weight he's lifting and his headache; his words feel clumsy on his tongue.  “Yes, I’m great, but I need a…favor.”  He touches her wrist, tilts his chin up meaningfully toward his projectiles.  Her brow furrows for a moment, and then she senses that he's doing something in the Force and follows the ripples.  Her mouth opens in a silent “Oh….” 

“When I give the signal,” he says quietly, “I need you to grab Obi-Wan and pull…pull him out of there.”  Even if he was good at communicating complex things like that over his training bond with Obi-Wan, he wouldn't even notice a subtle projection right now, and distracting him by forcing his way in could be fatal.  “So you need to—Ahsoka, look at me”—small points of red and blue light dance in her eyes as she tears her gaze away from the fight—“you do not enter the, the duel unless you have to.  Defense .  Just sl…skulk around the edges until I…ah, whistle or something.”

“Got it.”  She nods decisively, the set of her mouth grim.  “I'll be careful.  Don't accidentally squash me, Skyguy,” she adds, a glimmer of mischief returning to her expression.

It’s really not funny and actually one of his worst nightmares, but he returns her a wry twist of his lips.  “No promises.”  She grins with fangs, then stands and stalks away along the edge of the battlefield, igniting her sabers.

The fight has accelerated to a frenzied pace, effectively showcasing the prodigious talent of both duelists, but also how much they are tiring—getting desperate, impatient, sloppy.  Obi-Wan, fighting with uncharacteristic aggression after weeks of active combat with limited rations while recovering from a crash concussion and an arm injury, is tiring faster.  The momentum of the fight has turned definitively against him and forced him back to his Soresu foundations, but he’s still being pushed backward pivot by pivot.  The weight of the massive pile of rubble overhead is starting to genuinely strain Anakin, but he just grits his teeth and continues matching the battle, waiting for the perfect moment.

Ahsoka prowls around the battlefield, clearly unhappy with Anakin’s admonition not to join in but also aware that this is too fast an unpredictable a fight for her to intervene in without a perfect window.  Dooku ignores her completely.

That's always been his most glaring weakness, dismissing people like his padawan.

A stutter in the rhythm of battle—Dooku gets in a decent Force shove, knocking the wind out of Obi-Wan even though he keeps his feet.  It creates distance between them, and suddenly Obi-Wan is right next to Ahsoka.

Anakin lets out a short, piercing whistle.  With a garbled cry of “Don’t-question-it-Obi-Wan!” Ahsoka seizes her grandmaster’s arm and sprints for the edge of the clearing to Anakin’s left, practically dragging him and flinging him ahead of her with her Force-assisted strength.

And then Anakin drops the rocks from fifty feet up.

For half a second, it looks as if that’s going to be it.  But no, Dooku has been alerted by Ahsoka and Obi-Wan’s behavior.  He takes a few wary steps back, looking around with narrowed eyes for the threat.  Like most people, it takes him a moment to look up, but the whistling of air resistance alerts him, and his eyes widen.  At the last possible second, Dooku throws his hands up.

The sound the barrage makes is thunderous as the first boulders smash against an invisible obstacle and are suspended in midair, leaving their fellows to fall directly on top of them until the whole mass shudders with the impacts.  Acting on pure instinct, Dooku has caught all of the boulders, not just the ones directly above him, and now they fan out in a rough cone with a five-yard radius, its flattish circular base hovering dangerously six inches above his uplifted hands and saber.  There's something incredibly eerie about that great black mass, an imitation mountain, hovering over the entire intersection and that one small man, blocking the starlight, pregnant with purpose.

Now the roles are reversed, and Anakin is the one pressing down with the force of gravity on his side.  Concentration, even for a Jedi master, is ultimately a finite resource.  If Anakin couldn't split his focus enough while holding back Dooku’s saber to roll two feet to the side, Dooku has no hope of running all the way to the edge of the intersection while holding up this massive weight of rubble.  If he tries to drop the boulders at the outside first, he’ll trap himself like a bug in a jar; the boulders that pile at the edges reach a height taller than the seven feet or so at which Dooku has suspended the pile.  And he certainly can't throw the rubble away with Anakin holding it in place.  All he can really spare the presence of mind to do is push.

Dooku drops his saber to brace his other hand against the metaphysical attack, face still underlit in red as his features contort into a pained grimace beneath the beard.  Anakin’s lips curl unconsciously into a feral grin.  “What’s wrong, Count?” he calls out—further distractions can only help.  “Can dish it out, but you can't take it?”

Dooku growls audibly, the type of choked sound a conventional weightlifter might make under a dangerously heavy load.  Indeed, his whole body is braced as if under a real, physical pressure.  The suspended mountain of rubble, only really visible where it’s underlit by Dooku’s saber, inches downward perceptibly.

Anakin’s not actually using his full strength to push down.  Part of it is going toward holding together the pile at the edges, keeping it contained within its bounds over the intersection, but with the aid of the rubble’s weight, he still has more than enough strength left to crush Dooku like a gnat right now.  But he finds he doesn't want to.  As soon as he had Dooku genuinely pinned, he realized he really wants to crush him very slowly.  This man has tortured him; Anakin would like to torture him in return.  He realizes he would truly like to slowly cook this fucking gnat in the fires he himself stoked.

Obi-Wan is saying something, but Anakin doesn't really register it.  His vision has tunneled.  Sweat is now running down Dooku’s forehead and neck in rivulets, darkening his beard.  He has a look on his face like he really wants to say something.  He always wants to say something, doesn't he.  Some liquid thing in Anakin’s chest and stomach smolders pleasantly at the idea of making him suffer his last moments in silence.  Though really a scream would be satisfying.  Or a gurgle.

Now Ahsoka is talking, he thinks.  Saying something to Obi-Wan in a perturbed tone; the Force around them curdles with unease.  They can handle whatever it is, though, he's sure.  Anakin applies just a little more pressure in the Force, and Dooku’s arms visibly tremble.

He really is nothing, isn't he?  All his dignity, his voluminous robes and stentorian tones, all his posturing.  But really, he’s just a pathetic old man sweating in silence as his own death opens a thousand eyes, staring from all around him.  As his own death picks its way toward him on bare calloused feet.

Anakin pushes just a little harder and watches the rock pile drop a foot or so.  It touches Dooku’s hands.  He thinks he hears a little gasp, a wheeze.

Everyone gets a little power and acts like they're somebody, until you get them under your heel.  Then they remember what they are.  Then they finally realize what they've always been.  Then skyscrapers rise and fall, civilizations topple under their own weight, planets crack into pieces under the burning rays of the suns that birthed them, galaxies spin apart under their own centrifugal force and freeze their grateful populations in their zeal to flee from themselves.  Every fucking thing deludes itself, one way or another, into thinking that it’s important, that it’s immortal.

Only Death is honest.  Only Death is faithful.

War is truth because Death is truth, the truth of Power, the truth of Providence, the truth of their futility, and that truth is there is always a bigger heel.

He tastes blood and acid,

and his cheeks hurt,

and he wants to make this miserable smear of bantha shit kneel—

A small “pew!” rings out, and a flash of blue light.  Everyone present gets a momentary glimpse of Dooku teetering forward, an expression of mild surprise on his face, before several thousand pounds of rock fall directly on top of him with a thunderous roar.  His presence in the Force winks out like a snuffed candle.

It takes a moment for the earth to stop shaking enough for most of the spectators to stagger to their feet.  A few smaller pieces of rubble bounce down the sides of the pile, and a cloud of dust rises silently from the gaps in the sudden spotlight illumination from the clones’ helmet lights.  Anakin blinks dumbly, a little dazed, a little disappointed, but the abrupt end to that little episode has cut his anger off at the knees.  In retrospect, he really shouldn't have been taking chances with Dooku just for the sake of punishment; he still burns at the fact that the gungans didn't immediately kill Grievous before that prisoner exchange that still keeps him up at night could happen.  He’ll blame it on the concussion.  The man’s dead now, that's good.

Rex stands up fully from behind a half-ruined wall to Anakin’s left.  “Alright, who got him?”

“That would be me, sir!”  Another helmet pops up from a position directly behind where Dooku was facing, decorated with six blue dots, three lined up down each “cheek.”  Lens, if Anakin remembers correctly; a recent transfer from the best squad of sharpshooters in Executor battalion.  A good shot, but not particularly distinguished.  It was pure luck that he transferred before the battle over Arami, where he would certainly have died otherwise.

Rex considers him for a silent moment.  The grin in his voice is audible when he finally answers, “Good man.”

The rest of the surrounding clones begin to erupt into cheers as exuberant as when they got Grievous, but Rex immediately cuts them off with a hand signal, the semi-distant sound of blasters enough to remind them that the night’s work is far from over.  Ever professionals, they immediately quiet, though Anakin can feel their elation expanding like an enormous balloon in the atmosphere over the clearing.  Rex turns to Anakin and Obi-Wan, who Anakin finally registers is unusually distracted, giving his former padawan (who’s finally managed to sit up, thank the Force) an odd, unreadable look.  Anakin raises an eyebrow, and he shakes himself a little before directing his attention to Rex.  “Generals, your orders?”

“We need to know where they're attacking from.  Shield is still intact, evidently.  Captain, could your communications officers get in contact with the point lieutenants and compile a status report?” Obi-Wan says smoothly, disguising how heavily he’s still breathing from the protracted fight fairly well.

Rex glances at two men to his right, who nod and presumably begin contacting lower command over helmet comms.  Anakin catches Rex’s eye, as much as is possible through the visor.  “If we can convince the droids that their general is dead, at least thirty percent of them should be compromised by executive dysfunction.  And any formations not dictated by long-term strategy should fall apart, even if there's a droid general in play.  Can we get Engineering and Comms to exploit the same bug they found in the last battle, assuming they only patched the system access part and not the comms access?”  Mind already focused on the technical challenge, Anakin tries to stand again before his body rudely reminds him that he can't (and he still feels really odd, almost dazed).  He flushes.  “Actually, could somebody just help me get to Engineering?”

“You should be going back to Medical, Master,” Ahsoka mutters disapprovingly from his side as two of the 501st sharpshooters rush over to awkwardly help him balance on his one working foot.  Anakin bites his tongue hard as the motion tugs at his messily-cauterized open chest wound, and his headache spikes brutally.  It takes some effort to wave a hand airily and minimize the strain in his voice.  “Medical can come with me to Engineering.”

The two guys deputized by Rex to gather status reports signal their readiness to share then, so they all tune back in as the full squad works its way around their cover and the rock pile to gather on command’s side of the clearing, casting the occasional wary glance at the unmoving rubble.  “Prognosis is decent, sirs.  Though we were caught by surprise by the frontrunners on speeders at points C, E, and H, all squads effectively mobilized to their stations in time to repel the bulk of the attack in both valleys.  No attempt was made to take either ridge.  Numbers are smaller than expected; estimated 300 clankers in the south with only twelve tanks and fifteen speeders remaining, 250 in the north with thirteen tanks, one with a shield popper, no speeders yet sighted.  Lieutenant Borstin at point H is preparing to make a rush to take out the popper with a squad of twenty-two.  Bombers reportedly seem hesitant to take out their own men again, but Borstin requested Jedi assistance as a precaution.”

“On it,” Ahsoka says, sprinting off to the south at Obi-Wan’s confirming nod.

“Lines are holding strong at all points,” the other comms guy picks up the summary.  “Cannons are jammed again, though.  Second Lieutenant Kelvin in the tower is trying to get them back online so we can take out a few of the bombers before we try to push them back any further.  Overall, we suffered twenty-two casualties in the first few minutes of the attack, before we got our feet back under us.  Eleven injured, two dead between points C and E.  Nine watchmen found dead on the path Count Dooku presumably took into the camp.  Two more are still unaccounted for.”

Anakin’s chest pangs at the news, but it's better than he'd hoped for.  And Dooku is dead!  The war is basically over.  It's almost surreal.

Fighting through the feeling, he glances at Obi-Wan.  “I’m gonna head to the tower, work on the cannons and then join the slicing team to share the good news with the clankers.”  Even after literal years as a commander and then a general, some immature part of him still hates asking for approval from a commanding officer, even the old master he used to obey easily (most of the time) as a padawan; this casual, carefully non-questioning tone is one of the many little communication workarounds they've developed over the years to deal with Anakin’s various issues.

Obi-Wan glances over Anakin with a critical eye, and he must look truly terrible given the grimace that pulls at the corner of his old master’s mouth, but he knows they can't spare anyone on this final push; though not nearly as badly as before, they're still outnumbered and outgunned.  “Understood,” Obi-Wan acknowledges, playing along with the familiar charade.  “We should get word up to General Koon as well, share any slice you can develop with him if we can.  Captain, you take south, I take north?”

Rex acknowledges with a “Yes, sir,” and an efficient salute.  He nods to his own general as well before they both jog off in opposite directions, Rex taking the rest of the squad with him except for the two still awkwardly holding up Anakin and his dangling kkrorkupine-victim leg.  Being dragged probably kriffed it up badly; he knows he lost a few needles.  Anakin takes advantage of the helmet comms of one of the men dragging him toward the tower, Private Dje’k, to ping Kix’s second-in-command medical officer asking for somebody they can spare in a minute or two at the engineering tower.  Undoubtedly Kix himself will rush over and glare ruthlessly at him for underselling the situation and conveniently forgetting the medical prioritization protocols that put commanding officers at the top of the triage list, but a general can dream.

They have a long night ahead of them.  But by the time dawn pokes its first vermillion rays over the horizon—the smallest of the three suns is rising first today, evidently—its light spreads across a force of four hundred sweaty, exhausted men nonetheless whooping and cheering, leaping in the air and hugging each other and getting unbelievably drunk on bathtub liquor someone, improbably, smuggled out of the wreck of the Dominator in their elation.  Dooku’s remaining droids have been decimated.  The space battle is won.  And word has just come in from Plo Koon and his army in orbit that, upon receiving video proof of the death of its leader, the Separatist senate has officially capitulated.

/B/

Four hours later, Plo Koon is finally able to put landers on the surface of Gamorr.  In another thirty minutes, Anakin and Obi-Wan’s small combined force is loaded and ready for takeoff.  Everyone is happy to say goodbye to this miserable little planet, though Anakin considers that it wasn't as bad as a lot of places he's been.  In terms of the types of injuries he received, it's decently high on the list—crush injuries are always more of a bitch to deal with than burns or piercing injuries, in Anakin’s informed medical opinion—but in terms of overall casualties and pure misery, the fighting wasn't that bad.  The crash was bad, but only, statistically, in terms of percentage; a long-term siege or major attack begun with the full numbers of the 501st will usually cost significantly more lives.  It makes him sick to think of it that way for a lot of reasons, though, not least that he has some of the lowest casualty numbers by engagement in the whole GAR.

But even if they had lost significantly more men on Gamorr, he thinks there still would have been a festival mood as the landers rose into the black.  Because, for once, most of those sacrifices really felt directly, concretely impactful.  If they hadn't held out Gamorr as long as they did, Dooku wouldn't have gotten desperate enough to sneak into camp for an assassination alone.  The war wouldn't be over.

The war is over.  It ended.   It's still weird to be thinking like that.  He's still getting used to thinking about it in the past tense.

Soon, he's going to have to start thinking about the future.  Seeing Ahsoka through to knighthood—Force knows she's already far wiser and more experienced than he was when he was knighted, but he’ll hold on for a few more months at least, out of pure selfishness if nothing else.  Dropping out of the Jedi Order.  Marrying Padme publicly.  Starting a family with her.  And balancing that with, someday soon, seeing how many of his men choose to go mercenary after their release from the army—he’s sure it won't be an insignificant number.  Offering them a job, as free men.  Going back to Tatooine and Zygerria, establishing contacts, and using the one thing he's good at to do the only thing he's really wanted to do since he was very young.

Anakin certainly isn't done with war.  He doesn't think he’ll ever be, for better or for worse.  But he's more than done with this one.  He is very, very excited to see his wife again.

And it helps his mood that he won't be going back to her on one foot.  The 104th brought with it a medical ship with bacta and a pressure chamber advanced enough to help with safely resetting the bone shards.  His foot officially will not need to be chopped off.  Sure, he's going to face months of secondary surgeries and physical therapy before he can walk unassisted again.  Staying in shape will be a mess.  The creeping feelings of vulnerability will be a mess.  The hoverchair is useful, but he finds it irrationally embarrassing; he’s bad at manipulating it and he does not like looking up at people.  Any other campaign, and he thinks he might have felt overwhelmed by that prospect, pulled down into the dark places he slogged through whenever the downtime dragged too long for so much of the war.

But what the hell.  He’s gonna get to see his wife again.  Indefinitely.   He anticipates riding that high for at least a month.

He still doesn't know quite what to do about mending ties with Obi-Wan.  He knows his old master is still angry at him, despite their partial rapprochement after the crash, but he refuses to apologize for killing Krell.  He’s just at a loss for how else to resolve things if Obi-Wan won't follow their usual script of just pretending to ignore it and moving on, resurrecting the matter only for the occasional cutting comment when they irritate each other again.

But if it weren't for Obi-Wan’s conspicuous absence, life would be…honestly better than any time he can remember.

/B/

Speak of him, and he shall appear.  The next morning, after an absolutely luxurious eight hours of uninterrupted sleep (the surgical sedation may have helped; some of the guys were complaining good-naturedly about the time change), Anakin hears a knock on his cabin door and hits the button at his desk to open it remotely.  Obi-Wan is there, looking slightly frazzled with his beard still fluffy from the campaign.

“Obi-Wan,” Anakin says very casually.  “What brings you here?”  By way of response, Obi-Wan smiles and holds up three wrapped koja nut dessert ration bars.  Anakin hasn't seen those since the first months of the war, when he was still commander of the 212th.  Plo Koon must have squirreled them away for a celebration.

Anakin raises an eyebrow.  “Wow, Master Plo’s been holding out on us!”

“Yes indeed.  Somehow he managed to produce three pallets of these for breakfast this morning, but he wasn't anticipating the extra three hundred-odd men when he stored them away.  I barely managed to snatch these before the auctioneering started.”

Anakin accepts his and Ahsoka’s with a smile, mood lightening further.  So Obi-Wan’s finally gotten around to the pretending-it-didn't-happen stage, it was just a matter of time.  Anakin’s a bit more prone to grudges in general, but in this case he's happy to oblige.

And then Obi-Wan does something completely unexpected.  “I’ll admit these are a bit of an apology gift.”

Anakin freezes a moment before biting down.  “Apology for…?”

“I’ve—well, frankly, I have been acting beastly toward you.  I shouldn't have avoided you when you were hurt.  I, ah.  Wasn't sure what I would say.”

“Oh,” Anakin says.  I just figured you were still angry, he doesn't say.  “No worries.  You made it over when it mattered, so.  Can't complain about your timing.”

“Well, be that as it may, I should apologize, Anakin.  I still disagree with what you did, if only because vows are—well, anyway.  I don't wish to start another fight.  I understand why you did it, and I can admit that some of my reaction was…perhaps disproportionate.  Founded on some, ah.  Incorrect assumptions.”

Obi-Wan is practically grimacing by the end of this, radiating so much awkwardness that Anakin takes pity on him.  He learned to translate from Obi-Wan-speak to ordinary Basic with maybe sixty-percent accuracy by his early teens, though it kind of plateaued there.  But Obi-Wan is being remarkably transparent today.  “You were afraid,” Anakin says easily.  “I get that.  I was, ah.  Disconcerted, as well.”

“I suppose that's one way to put it.  But regardless, that conversation should not have happened the way it did.”  Obi-Wan pauses, and an odd, hesitant look steals across his face.  “I’ll admit, there was a moment at the end, when we were trying to deal with Count Dooku, when it was—I felt—”  He cuts himself off before Anakin can figure out what he’s getting at.  “But no, never mind, that's not at all what I came here meaning to say.”

His eyes soften.

“I am proud of you, padawan.  Somehow, and probably in spite of me, you've become….”  There's a huskiness to his tone, and he has to pause to search for the words: “...the best man I know, and a very good master to Ahsoka.  I should never have let my fears for you blind me to what matters.”

Anakin is…floored.  For a moment, he has no idea how to respond.  He just replays Obi-Wan’s words on repeat in his head, feeling the warmth of them seep into his bones, feeling like this is most of what he's been waiting for his entire life, maybe.  Like he could live on Obi-Wan’s pride like air, like the Force, breathe it in and let it envelop him.  He actually feels kind of lightheaded.

“Master,” he begins.  “Obi-Wan, I—”

He pauses, hears himself.  Coughs into his elbow.

“I appreciate that,” he continues with self-conscious steadiness, but he's still grinning like a loon.  “And you know if I’ve ever done anything decent, it's thanks to you, you old goat.”  He feels his cheeks heat up a bit.  “And perhaps I also should have, you know.  Read you in on the plan with Krell.  In retrospect.  Though I don’t regret how it turned out.”

Obi-Wan’s somewhat overgrown beard moves in that way it does when he’s fidgeting, sucking in his cheeks.  “Well…I suppose we can agree to disagree.  Force knows we've done it before.”

“Did I ever actually agree to that?” Anakin jokes.

Obi-Wan smiles again, and it more than reaches his eyes; it transforms his thin, dirty face, so much so that for a moment, from the low angle of the hoverchair, it's like Anakin is ten again.  “Perhaps I just chose to believe you did, for my own peace of mind.”

From behind them comes the whooshing sound of the door opening; Obi-Wan turns quickly to face it, while Anakin makes an inexpert attempt to spin the hoverchair around, bangs his good knee on the desk, and resorts to impatiently craning over his shoulder.  One of the guys from lower down in Engineering, Jarrit, is poking his head around the doorframe.  “General Skywalker, sir?  Specialist Cheska asked if I could bring you to look at the seventh starboard radiator to settle an argument, if you're not busy with anything?  Commander Jens of the 104th is looking into buying a new vibro-duster unit, but our guys think he could rig a perfectly good one from scratch with the parts he has in storage.  Like we did on Munto Codru that time.  But, uh.  He doesn't believe us.”

Ha, sometimes he forgets how petty Cheska, one of his lead engineers, can be.  “Sure, I've got ten minutes,” he decides, happy for any excuse to leave the flimsiwork on his desk for a moment.  “Obi-Wan, are you up to anything?  Want to help us drive Cheska mad with power?”

“Ah, I’m alright, the defeat of the good Count has left me with rather a lot to do.  Mostly good things, for once.”

“Dinner, then?  With Ahsoka,” Anakin pushes, and he's gratified to see Obi-Wan’s smile grow in strength.

“Yes, I suppose I can make time for Ahsoka,” his old master allows.

“Alright, Jarrit, lead the way,” Anakin grins, finally getting the hoverchair backed up enough to semi-gracefully swivel toward the door.  “Seven standard, Obi-Wan, don't fall asleep!”  Engineering Officer Jarrit, who has been waiting very politely by the door, tactfully withdraws his unspoken offer to push and heads down the hallway, Anakin falling into step (so to speak) beside him.  They've made it a few yards down the hallway when Obi-Wan calls out from behind him, uncharacteristically, flustered.  “Oh, wait, stars, Anakin!  I got completely sidetracked, I meant to give you these.”  Light footsteps chase them down the hallway; Anakin turns.

His old master is holding out something dark and angular.  Anakin takes it from him, turns it over in his hands.  It takes him a moment to recognize it as a pair of sun goggles.

“One of the privates in the 501st somehow managed to buy these before deployment, no idea how.  I had to pay him a premium for the blasted things.”

Anakin reaches instinctively for his belt, where he'd taken to hanging his own shades, and realizes he hasn't actually seen them for some time.  Obi-Wan notices the movement.  “Your old ones were with you when you were injured.  Quite beyond repair, I’m afraid.”

The new pair is in a more conventional goggle shape, though still not flush with the face in a way that would look too weird indoors.  It has the thick joints that will hide his eyes from the sides, and a thin line of gleaming brass tracing the tops and bottoms of the frames.  Padme, who serves as his fashion sense, will still probably laugh at the sight of him, but then, he likes to make her laugh.  They're still a fair sight nicer than his previous pair, and more in line with his own tastes.

Anakin’s throat feels unaccountably tight again.  Perhaps a delayed reaction to Dooku’s neck-drag the night before.  “Thank you, Obi-Wan.  I appreciate it.”

“Well.”  Obi-Wan looks a bit lost.  “As long as you do.  And next time you see Private Bentham, please tell him from me that he's a beast and a con man.”

Private Bentham undoubtedly offered Obi-Wan the goggles for free when he asked for them and twice over when he learned who they were meant for, but Obi-Wan enjoys his little obfuscations.  Anakin has never met another man who takes such an earnest joy in bitching, as a pastime.  “I’ll pass on your deepest antipathies.”

Obi-Wan sniffs.  “Excellent.  Now, I believe you have an appointment with a radiator.”  Without further ado, he beats a slightly too-hasty retreat toward his own quarters.

Private Jarrit side-eyes the goggles as they turn down the next hallway.  Anakin grins and slides them into place on his nose.  “What do you think?”

“Oh, the height of fashion, sir,” Jarrit replies, beaming. 

/B/

From the Records of the Founding of the Aurelian Reform Sith Order, Server 12A, Datalog 22103742.33, Entry 326/412, transcript abbr.

14/31, 20 BBY

Incoming call 22:38, logged and recorded 22:39–22:41 (2mins 12secs)

BO [22:39:02]: Hello, Master Skywalker.

BO [22:39:04]: Your friend Senator Amidala gave me the address for this commlink, and assured me that a conventionally encrypted message left in its records would neither bother you on campaign nor risk giving away your position.  She has been very kind.

BO [22:39:43]: I am calling to let you know that I have taken your advice, at least in part.  I have not left the Jedi Order, but I have requested and been granted a one-year sabbatical.  I was [pause] somewhat surprised it was approved, during wartime.  I have since become aware that Master Nu expressed her support, citing concerns she held about my health and wellness, and that my own master seconded her assessment.

BO [22:40:20]: I am not sure whether to feel touched or [pause] very angry.  [ext. pause]  I did not think that anyone had noticed.

BO [22:40:31]: I have acquired an apartment I can afford on my stipend, with the help of Senator Amidala, and my master was even able to help me move in some furniture during the last day of her leave.  I served her tea.  It was [pause] nice.

BO [22:40:54]: But I have gotten off track.  I meant to tell you that I have had time to do some research.  I have been spending time daily in the barracks hospital, helping with the non-urgently wounded in from the most recent campaign, and I have discovered some very interesting applications of our new discipline to healing!  But I have also noticed something odd, while attempting to help a corporal with a head injury, that I think merits further inquiry.

BO [22:40:01]: Have any of your or Master Kenobi’s men noticed [pause] emotional volatility?  Unusual urges?  Feel free to comm me back when it is convenient for you.

Call ended [22:41:14]

From the Records of the Founding of the Aurelian Reform Sith Order, Server 12A, Datalog 22103742.33, Entry 327/412, transcript abbr.

14/31, 20 BBY

Incoming call, 22:42, logged and recorded 22:42–22:42 (0mins 40secs)

BO [22:42:07]: Hello, Ahsoka!  I hope you are well, or as well as you can be out there. [pause]

BO [22:42:12]: Much has changed since my last message!  The least of it is, Senator Amidala invited me for tea in her office.  She ultimately had to leave in something of a hurry, but it was very kind of her.  And you were right, the crepes there are shockingly good.

BO [22:42:31]: But what I truly called to tell you is that I have been doing good work!  The clones on medical leave have been happy to assist with my research on alternative healing techniques, thanks to your captain’s introductions, and I have had some success, indulging my curiosity nearly to its limits, except that it only generates more questions.  I find myself—excited, I would say!  For the future, for the first time in [pause] some time, and to share my discoveries with you when you return.

BO [22:42:43]: May the Force be with you always!

End call [22:42:47]

14/36, 20 BBY

Incoming call, 03:43, logged and recorded 03:43–03:43 (0mins 08secs)

BO [03:43:12]: Ahsoka, I’ve found something.  Tell your master we need to meet when you both get back.  I don't trust his line.

End call [03:43:20]

Chapter Text

It takes a truly inordinate amount of pestering and wheedling and you-owe-me-ing (the last part blatantly false; even if Obi-Wan hadn’t performed the most recent act of lifesaving, he’s had a politely unacknowledged advantage in that area for nearly the entirety of their acquaintance by virtue of being, like, old when Anakin was tragically prepubescent), but he finally convinces Obi-Wan to help him hobble into the Council chambers on his one decent foot for their debriefing.  For all that Kix’s cohort of disapproving medical officers insist there's no shame in using the medical hoverchair, and for all that he agrees with them in theory, he just—he can't; something in him goes feral at the idea of looking up even further at that raised dais of elders, who have been judging him unworthy since he was nine.  There's the exposure issue too, the idea of sitting with all that space behind him and not being able to turn easily.  His gut churns just imagining it.  He'd rather break the other leg.

So, with a long-suffering sigh and a roll of his eyes, Obi-Wan lets Anakin sling an arm over his shoulders and hauls him to his feet, or really his fractured-but-not-broken and thoroughly splinted left foot.  They ditch the hoverchair in the same discreet corner of the anteroom where he ambushed Krell all those weeks before (now that was an enjoyable Council meeting) and limp as subtly as they can into the sunlit chamber.

A few eyebrows raise at their three-legged entrance.  No snide comments, though; he and Obi-Wan have killed their enemies for them, so the Council gives them some grace.  It’s embarrassing, but not enough to make him want to kill everyone in here and then himself, especially when they reach a place where they can stand still and he's able to balance mostly on his own, aided only by a discreet hand on Obi-Wan’s shoulder.  Hurts like hell, of course.  It will not show in his expression.

“Master Kenobi, Knight Skywalker,” the hologram of Yoda opens peaceably.  “Congratulate, we must, yourselves and your men.  A great victory, you have won.  Several great victories, at great cost.”  Nods and murmurs of agreement ripple around the room, and a few nudges of sincere appreciation bloom in the Force from friendlier members like Plo Koon and Ki-Adi-Mundi.  Most of the Council members look as serene as ever, if a bit haggard, but the air of hesitant excitement permeating the Force persists even here.  There are also members present, like Masters Koth and Windu, whom Anakin hasn't seen attend in-person in—wow, he’s not even sure how long.  Windu has his head down, paging through a datapad, but he looks like he might actually be smiling a little.

Obi-Wan inclines his head with a respectful “Thank you, Master Yoda.”  Anakin nods in acknowledgment of the praise.

After another moment of scrolling, Master Windu finally looks up and clears his throat.  “We will keep this debrief—ah, brief,” he begins, “considering how busy this Council is now that peace has been formally declared, as well as the fact that Generals Kenobi and Skywalker have more than earned their leave.”  Ah, so it’ll be two hours rather than four, then.   “General Kenobi, I’ll ask you to remain after General Skywalker is dismissed to discuss the Senate’s newest proposal regarding clone resettlement and back pay.  But for this meeting, our main priority is to better understand the events surrounding the executions of General Grievous and former master Yan Dooku, with special attention to any information about the Sith Lord whom Kenobi has alluded to in prior reports.  If this Sith truly exists and D—the late Master Dooku” (he’s too composed to glance at Yoda, but it's clear for whose benefit he’s using the term of respect) “was not simply aiming to sow paranoia, then bringing this individual to justice and safeguarding our hard-won peace should be a high priority of this Council going forward.”

At Anakin’s side, Obi-Wan tenses slightly; he has mentioned that this is an issue that’s divided the Council.  Master Windu’s language was carefully impartial, but Anakin thinks he’s probably on Obi-Wan’s side.  Admittedly, Anakin's kind of glad this is now their problem, with him definitively sidelined for the next month.  He’s a lot more concerned about their desire to “better understand the events surrounding” the deaths of Grievous and Dooku.  It takes a supreme force of will not to readjust the new sun goggles on his nose.

The first half hour of the debrief is fairly standard; Anakin and Obi-Wan pretty much just confirm their written reports, recounting the pertinent details of their most recent deployment in order, with occasional prompting or clarifying questions from the Council members.  Their cover story for the state of Grievous’ corpse is that one of the wires used to restrain him was live, and the clones present will back it up to a man—sure, the clones of the 501st and 212th are individuals, and not all of them are loyal to or even like their generals, but peer pressure is a force to be reckoned with.  Beyond that, it feels a little wrong to be grateful for it, but with Knight Kallist dead and her padawan and foundling both shell-shocked (the former also a little star-struck, through his grief, and loyal enough to solemnly agree not to mention anything odd), there are no witnesses unaccounted for.  If the spy droid footage Dooku referenced somehow made its way to Coruscant, Anakin might have to get off-planet in a hurry, but for now this particular secret seems as safe as they could reasonably expect.

“His weakness, always, impatience was,” Master Yoda comments quietly when they finally get to Dooku’s incursion into their encampments.  His tone starts out grim but, by the end, just sounds tired and sad.

Master Windu, however, furrows his brow.  “Indeed.  But if that was the case, the way he paced his attack from the beginning of the siege to this point seems odd.  Even if we assume he had no heavy weaponry for a bombardment from space—and we've confirmed that he exhausted those capabilities at his prior engagement—you said yourselves that he could easily have attacked you with overwhelming force within the first week.  Instead, he portioned out and wasted his strength over a long period.”

“This is true,” Plo Koon agrees, stroking a hand over his mouthpiece.  “It was not only unwise, but also uncharacteristic.  Master Kenobi, you used an interesting phrase over comms after our arrival—you said it was as if he was ‘working himself up to something’?”

“And that's not the only thing that doesn't add up,” Master Windu agrees, and the knot in Anakin’s stomach coils tighter.  “Knight Skywalker, he targeted you, specifically, for personal assassination when crushing your combined forces stopped being a possibility.  I’ve read back over past mission reports—frankly, he’s never shown much interest in you as an enemy, while he’s sought out whole conversations with Master Kenobi.”  Damn it, damn it, of course they’d start asking the right questions.  Anakin feels himself color slightly; if he had any inclination to remind this council of that time Dooku kidnapped and tortured him, he might have mentioned that in his defense here, but it's true that was mostly a matter of expedience.

Adi Gallia, who has been half paying attention and half working on something on a datapad throughout this whole debriefing, looks up at Windu’s words, nodding.  “Yes, and while his tent was certainly guarded, you were in the medical complex, the most closely guarded area of the camp.  Of the two of you, you may have been an easier target to find, but you were certainly a harder one to hit.”

Anakin glances sidelong at Obi-Wan from the privacy of his sun goggles.  Obi-Wan is an oasis of calm in the surface Force, wearing his signature expression of polite, impenetrable interest.  His currents of control mask any amplitude spike in Anakin’s ripples of nervousness; Anakin’s far too hopeless to mask his negative emotions entirely from the Council, but they're used to a baseline level of incompetent fear and resentment from him.  Maybe by now they've even gone noseblind to it.  “I agree his behavior was unusual,” Obi-Wan offers with an appropriate tone of concern.  “I’m not sure why he targeted Anakin in particular; clearly he knew he was injured, so maybe he simply hoped to start with the softer target in that respect.  As for his odd tactics, though: During our fight, I called his attention to his poor performance and the recent loss of Grievous, and he essentially told me he didn't care about the outcome of the war.  I believe his exact words were ‘Oh dear, the Separatist cause, lost.  Who could have seen it coming?’”

Anakin straightens, pushes a little harder on Obi-Wan’s shoulder.  “He said something like that to me too.  I can't exactly quote him, but he basically said he didn't care if he lost the war.”

They’ve discussed in advance what they can say to the Council.  They certainly can’t mention that Dooku’s master supposedly wants Anakin to replace him.  They didn’t actually know for sure that Dooku had a master until he admitted it, though Obi-Wan has long suspected that the so-called “Darth Sidious” is or was Dooku’s master, and that was how Dooku knew about Sidious back then, rather than through the supposed tattling of the Viceroy of the Trade Federation.  Someone had to teach Dooku his Darksider skills, and the Sith aren’t known for writing down their knowledge for all and sundry, Rule of Two tossed out the speeder window.

One might then wonder if anything Dooku said about Sidious can be believed, but between what he’s seen and what Padme has told him over the years, Anakin has no trouble imagining malice as well as incompetence hiding behind the Senate’s tendencies toward corruption and apathy.  Obi-Wan assumes a schism in the traditional Sithly style, and suspects that might be part of Dooku’s motivations for starting the war: If his master truly wields such influence in the Senate, his apprentice would naturally seek to tear that institution down.  In that case, it would make sense that the master wants a replacement for his treasonous apprentice, and that the apprentice would want to cut down that replacement as soon as possible.

It’s also possible that Dooku was still in league—more or less—with his master when he died, and his master and Darth Sidious—if the latter even exists—are or were entirely different people.  It’s important not to make too many assumptions in a case like this.  

But regardless, they can't mention this Sith master wanting Anakin, so redirect, redirect, redirect.

“Frankly, I’d say this all but confirms what I have been telling this council for years,” Obi-Wan intones.  “And still we have yet to engage in a serious investigation of the senators who’ve benefited most from this war, as well as any and all associates.  The war is over.  We have the resources.”

Mace Windu glowers with the air of a man subjected to repeated surprise demonstrations of Fives’ growing exotic instrument collection.  “Obi-Wan, you're well aware of why we can’t launch a ‘full investigation’ of our political opponents based on the accusations of a known traitor.  We’ve made …discreet…inquiries on your suggestions before, taxing our already overburdened Shadows so much they’ve started threatening to unionize, and wholly without results.  I’m not saying you're wrong, I’m just saying there's only so much we can do right now.”

“Let us handle it then,” Obi-Wan offers.

If Mace had had a mouthful of water, he would have spit it out at that, Anakin reflects wistfully. “You two?  You've never had a discreet day in your lives!”

“Both of us have political connections that could provide a smokescreen for an investigation.  The Jedi investigating senators is one thing; their opponents investigating is business as usual, even with a few more resources than expected.”

“It would have been better if we could have taken Count Dooku alive,” Eeth Koth interrupts with a pointed look.  “Things would be so much easier if we could just interrogate him.”

And that’s absolutely kriffing rich.  Sure, yeah, take Dooku alive.  Not like they spent an entire damn war failing to kill the guy, much less capture him.  Obi-Wan’s nostrils are flaring, and Plo Koon, too, seems to be raising a hand to interject, but Yoda beats them to it.  “What could have been, no longer significant is.  Unoccupied Shadows, we now have.  Use them, we will, within our limits.  Satisfy you, does this, Master Kenobi?”

Obi-Wan bows, telegraphing enough to avoid unbalancing his padawan.  “Yes, Grandmaster.  I suppose this is a tricky moment for political suicide.”  But Anakin can see the muscle jumping in his jaw.

It’s another hour before they can finally retreat into the shadows of the antechamber.  As he gratefully lowers himself back into the hoverchair, Anakin mutters, “So you’ll be talking to Duchess Satine, I take it?”

“Who, me?” Obi-Wan responds mildly.  “Ah, my young padawan, how poorly you think of me.”  He’s smirking.

/B/

Evening is already falling on Coruscant, as much as it ever does.  Anakin pushes his hoverchair until the servos warm heading back to his and Ahsoka’s quarters, planning to grab his speeder keys, briefly check in with his padawan, and then subtly demolish all speed limits on the way to his wife’s apartments.  Ahsoka meets him at the door with her arms clasped behind her back and a pensive frown on her face.  “Oh, Skyguy!  I was just going to come looking for you.”

A spark of alarm.  “Is something wrong?”

“Uh—why don't you come in, first.”

Now genuinely clammy-handed, he lets the door slide closed behind him and sits up straight in the chair.  “What's up?”

Biting her lip, she pulls her holocomm out from behind her back.  “I was just going through my messages from when we were on Gamorr, and I’ve got a message from Barriss.  She wants to meet with both of us about something urgent, but she wouldn't say what it was over the lines.”

The relief he feels that there isn't something wrong with Ahsoka feels a bit traitorous; Barris is a nice kid as well.  “So, you think something…Sithly?”

“Maybe?  That's the obvious assumption, but I’ve got a feeling it's something more.”

Well, it doesn't do to discount a Jedi’s “feelings,” especially not one as talented as his padawan.  Now that she mentions it, he does feel a sort of charged tenseness sparking off their words.  “Alright, did she give a time and place to meet?”

“No, she couldn't know when we were getting back.  Should I call back and say, like, tomorrow evening?  Eight or nine?”

“Why not tonight, if it's urgent?” he asks, surprised.  He thinks his reluctance might be audible in the way it comes out; he really doesn't want to deal with this tonight, he wants to keep his appointment with his lovely wife.  But there's no way Ahsoka could know that—

Ahsoka is looking at him way too knowingly.  “Well, you're busy tonight, aren't you?” she says with—is that a smirk?

“I…well yeah, actually, I was going to tell you I was planning to—uh—work on one of my old speeders this evening, but I can do that another time if it's really a matter of life and death?”  He trails off at the end, eyeing her warily.  It's so weird looking up rather than down at her.

“Nah, I’ll make the offer, but I asked and she said she's okay, she's not in danger or anything.  I’m sure we can leave you and your speeders in peace for at least one night, Master.”  And she’s giggling a little as she says it.

“O…kay.”  Anakin narrows his eyes at her, but he's not one to look a gift bantha in the hindquarters.  “Alright.  I should be heading out then.  Don't hesitate to comm me if it's something urgent?”

“Swear on my life, Skyguy.”

“Alright then,” he repeats, feeling vaguely outnumbered.  “Alright.  See you tomorrow, Snips.”  He swipes his datapad from the counter, partly for show, and more or less flees his own quarters.

/B/

The idea of steering the hoverchair into Padme’s apartment is almost as bad as that of sitting in it in front of the Council, for similar but also very different reasons.  Anakin seriously debated breaking in through the bulletproof glass wall that looks out onto her balcony, leaving the chair in the speeder, and dragging himself over to install himself on her couch before she could get home from work.  In fact, he came very close to doing this.  He knows what Padme would think of it, though.  He wrestled with himself for almost an hour on the trip back to Coruscant, and finally arrived at the compromise he implements now, going in by the usual route (the servants’ tunnels up from the third garage) and leaving the chair by the couch, but still transferring himself to the couch perpendicular to the apartment’s main door before she gets back.

Thus, he manages to be leaning back on the arm casually, dare he say suavely, with one splinted leg crossed over the other when his wife breezes into the living room, accompanied by the scent of hyacinths and the flutter of gauzy orange robes that match the sun setting behind the room's glass wall.  She stops short when she sees him, seeming to need a moment to process it, and then her lips curl into a slightly wild grin.  “Ani!” she says with wonder in her voice.  “You're back!”

“I’m back.”

“Well, I knew that, but—you're back back!  Aren't you?”

He can't keep his grin from matching hers.  “I’m here to stay, as far as I can tell.”

This seems to flip some final switch in her, and with an adorable little scream, she sprints across the room and leaps into his arms, tackling him back onto the couch.  It actually hurts kind of a lot, but he can't tell if that's from her elaborate corset thing poking his bruised ribs or the fact that he can't stop cracking up.  In the moment, he really doesn't mind, hugging his wife so tight he'd almost be afraid of hurting her, except she's hugging back just as aggressively.  She’s warm and sweet-smelling with her head on his chest, and he's sure she'd look gorgeous if he weren't fully blinded by the caf-brown hair thrown forward over his face by her momentum.  For a few silent minutes, everything is perfect.

Then she shifts position and accidentally knees him in the thigh, and abruptly the pain is not irrelevant because he sees stars.   He must make some sort of punched-out noise, because she scrambles to her feet with a flurry of apologies.  “Oh Force, Ani, I’m so sorry, my love, kriff—”

“It's fine, it's fine!” he manages in hollowed-out tones, pushing himself back up to seated.  “I didn't mean to scare you!  It's not so bad, I’ll be fine in a month or so.  Please don't stop on my account.”

Padme gives a slightly teary laugh and sits down to hug him more gingerly but no less enthusiastically from the side, resting her chin on his right shoulder.  He enjoys this for a minute more and then pulls back slightly to kiss his wife fervently on the lips.  His wife, who now lives on the same planet as him.  His wife, whom he can actually be with full-time in the relatively near future.

His lips are tingling when they finally pull away.  She looks at him with warm brown eyes.  “Are you.  You know.  Good for the bedroom?”

He flushes.  “You, ah, might have to carry me.”

Padme grins sideways and gets up to pull the curtains across the glass wall.

/B/

After some only slightly debilitating consummation of their Nabooian wedding vows and the minor ordeal of Padme helping him prop himself on a wall to shower, they settle at her kitchen table for a meal of steaming takeout delivered by a jokingly put-upon Eirtaé.  

They chat about their respective friends for a while; Anakin smugly updates her on Ahsoka’s year-leading lightsaber combat scores and shares the latest funny stories circulating around the Vod (or at least the ones appropriate enough to be retold in the presence of a general).  On her suggestion, they slightly giddily plan a clandestine date weekend on Naboo as soon as things die down with her work.  Then the conversation—as usual, given their respective professions—turns to politics.  If anything, it seems Padme’s job has only gotten more hectic since the peace was concluded, and it doesn't take much prompting to bring out the angry flush of passion high on her cheeks.  “The resettlement of the clones has barely begun and already it’s being massively mishandled.  We’ve drawn up plans for this, you know?  Bail, Mon Mothma, and I, and a number of others in our faction, working with a number of GAR representatives who’ve contacted us through the home guard.  We'd gotten practically everyone on board, half of our measures are already signed into law, but now Mas Amedda’s faction are hemming and hawing about subjecting those measures to judicial review, and in the meantime more and more of the GAR from all over the galaxy are concentrating on Coruscant because they have nowhere else to go.”

“Really?  What about Kamino?  I mean, I know their facilities can't fit the whole GAR anymore, but surely it makes more sense to let the bulk of the Outer Rim forces return there while we get the first resettlement programs up and running.”  Anakin had noticed the shipyard seemed busier than usual while disembarking, but he put that down to just the nearest battalions being recalled upon victory.  If they're being brought in from the Outer Rim sieges, though, that's a problem—Coruscant is a galactic parasite without the space or resources to take care of its own population, much less a huge influx of battle-scarred veterans with no experience of civilian life.

“They’re using Master Ti’s probe of conditions on Kamino against us, saying it's an unsafe living situation for the clones.  The gods know that report and twenty more like it have been available since the fourth or fifth month of the war, and they never had any problem raising children there before.  It's ridiculous.  And I’ve had no luck figuring out what Amedda’s game is; I thought for sure he must still be in bed with the Kaminoans, but his bank records are clean, and as far as my sources can tell, they haven't been in contact for more than a year.”  She sighs.  “Even beyond the logistics, and not even mentioning social services, coordinating the resettlement of the army on planets of their choosing is going to require absolutely absurd amounts of diplomatic finagling, due to both prejudice and very reasonable security concerns.  We need to be laying the groundwork for that now, but it's impossible to make any real progress until we’ve established the basic terms we’ll be discussing, and the funding we can reasonably promise.  And we haven’t even confirmed yet when we’ll be legally disbanding the army!  This is genuinely the worst senatorial deadlock I’ve ever had the misfortune of witnessing, and you know I’ve seen a lot.”  Breathing hard, Padme stabs angrily at her takeout box, smothering her frustration in a huge bite of nerf lo mein.

As a moderate politician, Padme is careful about her use of hyperbole; if she’s saying it’s that bad, then the Republic really has cause for concern.  “I was going to go check in with Rex and the guys anyway, tomorrow or the next day; you want me to ask if they've heard anything?”

“Oh, yes please, that would be great!  Maybe we’ll have more luck coming at it from some angle more visible to the new arrivals.  Gods know we’re not accomplishing anything from this one.”

The conversation shifts, then, to more pleasant topics, but the bad feeling it evoked sticks in Anakin’s gut for the rest of the evening.

/B/

The next morning when he slinks back into the Temple, Ahsoka lets him know she’s scheduled a meeting with Barriss at seven in the evening on the far side of Coruscant’s local metro center, a solid hour’s flight away.  That gives him a shocking amount of free time, since he has another few days of passive-aggressively encouraged convalescence before he'll be put back on the regular knights’ duty rotation, so he goes and bothers Obi-Wan while he tries to do paperwork for a while, generously waters the man's poor, desperate houseplants, and then heads out on one of the Temple medical wing’s hoverchair-modified speeder bikes to meet Rex at the GAR barracks.

He almost doesn't recognize the place when he gets there—the Coruscant hub barracks have overflowed their traditional bounds and spilled down the streets in all directions, so that he enters them almost four miles before he realizes he has.  This capital barracks zone, the largest of the complexes on Coruscant, used to be the size of a small city-within-the-city, with clearly defined boundaries, with checkpoints before you hit those boundaries, and only ever around halfway occupied.  Now, those checkpoints have been subsumed and digested.  Army tents and quick-build sheds in various states of wear obstruct alleyways or huddle against buildings, becoming more haphazard the farther away they sprawl from the barracks proper.  Anakin spots one semi-field-standard pup tent jury-rigged across a staircase.  Most of the buildings on this side of the area cleared for the barracks at the start of the war are military admin offices, abandoned husks (no longer!), or factories suborned into serving the war effort, so no residential, but the factory workers forced to worm between clusters of bored, gambling armed soldiers on their way to work can't be too happy with these developments.  As he gets closer to the barracks zone walls, Anakin has to disconnect the hoverchair and ditch the speeder behind a stairwell.  It’s tough to find a route the chair can fit through sometimes, ducking around wires and canvas.  He wishes he could get creative on the rooftops the way he usually would, both to evade that and to avoid alarming the residents of a particularly densely populated block or two.

And he has good reasons for not wanting to alarm these residents, beyond his general good feeling toward the clones.  The Force atmosphere of this place smells like spinach gone just a bit off and tastes like the air before a lightning strike.  The men toss dice without enthusiasm or hunch over camp stoves or just pace aimlessly around their tents, waiting for news.  On one rooftop, Anakin spots a guy trying to rig some sort of spindly antenna out of barbed wire and speeder parts, presumably to help him slip through the firewalls limiting the clones’ Holonet access.  They wear their tension close-wrapped to the skin, in their too-straight postures and shifty eyes and fingers tap-tapping at their blaster grips.

Rex is waiting at the old gateway to greet him, looking harried and pale.  “Afternoon, General,” he greets with a less-than-crisp salute and a tired half-smile.

“Hey, Rex.” Anakin tries not to be distracted by the mushroomy texture of ill-will blooming from a fight a few hundred yards east.  “What in all the Sith hells is going on here?”

Fives, passing by carrying several lengths of industrial piping alongside a shiny Anakin doesn't recognize, catches this greeting and laughs.  “I swear, General, it was like this when we got here!” The shiny jumps at “General” and peers back nervously at Anakin as they disappear behind a now-obsolete checkpoint booth.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Rex finally answers tiredly, ushering Anakin through the gates once they've flashed their comms devices through the ID scanner.  “He isn't lying: It was already this bad when we arrived, and it's only gotten worse.  Apparently a new battalion has been arriving every six hours or so, with vague orders to bunk down here or at one of a few other planetary hubs.  It’s rank stupidity is what it is.”

“Well that's nothing new,” Anakin comments absently, drawing his shields a bit higher against the thickening miasma of dread and boredom as they wind their way deeper into the camp.  Everywhere, now, there are clones in various amounts of armor, walking, jogging, sitting down, building something, playing sabacc, and hundreds of eyes follow them as they pass.  It makes Anakin itch to stand.

Rex smiles humorlessly.  “Sure, but this is taking it to new heights.  You thought the overflow was bad out there?  General, it extends fifteen levels down.” Anakin sucks in a sharp breath at that.  The barracks compound was only meant to occupy two levels, the surface and the one below.  Six or seven would be bad, but fifteen?

“Commander Fox and some of the other homefront men are liaising with the politicians,” Rex continues, “trying to figure out who originally ordered this and what they could possibly be thinking.  You'd think that would be easy, but the powers that be keep giving them different answers.  I keep meaning to go help, but there's enough to be done just organizing supplies and keeping the peace—actually, that reminds me, have you spoken to Senator Amidala recently?”

There's a flush of amusement in the Force as he says it, but he says it with a completely straight face, so Anakin only side-eyes him and responds in kind.  “Yes, the Senator was actually the one to tell me about the issue here, though I couldn't have imagined the scale.”  Another thought occurs to him, and he frowns.  “And that's weird, now that I think about it, that the Council didn't mention it during our debrief.”  If not to him, then to Obi-Wan at least.  “What does the Temple have to say about the barracks?”

Rex hesitates for a moment the way he always does when he has to say something a Jedi might not like.  “We’ve had a few generals helping organize supply lines—here and on the other planets having the same problem—and a team of Padawans helping with medical, but no real coordinated response, none of the urgency you'd expect.  A lot of the guys are saying, well, you know”—another pause for discomfort—“but one of Commander Fox’s comm guys told me this morning he thinks our messages aren't going through.”

That's…alarming. “Well, I can help with that, at least.  I’ll bring it up with Obi-Wan, drag him down here if I have to, and he’ll bring it up in the next High Council meeting if he can't convene an emergency one himself.”

Rex considers.  “I’d say bring him down here; it’ll be better if he sees it.  Hard to understand how big this is in the abstract—and we're far from the only barracks dealing with it, though from what I’ve heard, we're the worst hit.  I mean, fifteen thousand of us packed into a camp meant for five or six, and there's another six thousand on the way—we’re turning into a heavily armed refugee camp here, General.”

“What’s the solution?  Short-term or long-term?”

“Long-term…they need to let us go back to Kamino, at least the ships who're still en route.  There's a lot we can do in the short term, but ultimately it’s all a band-aid; we just don't have the space or the systems.  Not enough bunks is one thing, but the sewage system is going to be a real problem if we can't push through new orders in the next week or two.”  He bites his lip, considering.  “And I hate to say it, but the worse conditions get, the worse morale gets.  The Chancellor has us patrolling the streets stopping petty crime just to give us something to do.”

“Wait, you've already gotten in contact with the Chancellor?”  Anakin brightens, momentarily shaking off the atmosphere of hopeless gloom.  “What does he say?  Can't he just countermand the order?”

And Rex…hesitates again, for the longest moment yet.  When he speaks, Anakin gets the sense he’s choosing his words very carefully, though not until some time later will Anakin figure out why.  “Well, the thing is, he says the order comes from the Jedi.”

/B/

Anakin is still turning the problem over in his head that evening when they pull up to the coordinates Barriss gave for their clandestine meeting.  He lets Ahsoka drive, one of the discreet but zippy speeders he keeps in a storage unit a few levels down for just these kinds of activities and rendezvous.  She’s a terror in the lanes.  He couldn't be more proud.

Intriguingly, it isn't Barriss who meets them in front of what looks like a small, rusting repair shop from the outside, but a clone in civilian clothing.  “In here,” he murmurs, gesturing them through a low doorway and, in the process, scaring a stray tooka out from behind some corrugated metal sheets leaning against the wall.

The clone closes the door behind them, leaving them in darkness for a few seconds.  Then the fluorescents overhead illuminate, revealing a clean and state-of-the-art facility that Anakin recognizes from padawan missions past as a fairly upscale underground clinic.  This front room clearly stores a variety of medical tools and equipment, most of it in drawers under the counters along three walls or waiting by the sonic unit to be sterilized, but he spots a row of empty IV stands and a portable MRI unit shoved in the back left corner.  Ahead of them, a hallway leads further back into the deceptively large interior, with doors along both sides that undoubtedly guard makeshift surgical suites and the first of a row of cots visible through the opening at the other end.

“She's through here,” the clone says quietly, a sour nervousness staining the air around him.  “She said she’d be—”

“Ahsoka!!” a voice shouts from the other end of the hallway, a voice Anakin doesn't even recognize for a moment for its audible, unreserved joy.  Then a dark shape skids around the corner from the room with the cots and takes the hallway at a decent clip, only managing to slow down to a more dignified fast walk for the last few strides.  “Barriss!” Ahsoka replies, grinning hugely and starting forward as well, and then Barriss has a moment of visible confusion when she reaches to enthusiastically clasp arms with Ahsoka only for Ahsoka to pull her off her feet into a twirling hug.  

“Oh dear, yes, hi!” Barris giggles, stumbling slightly when released.  “And hello to you too, Master Skywalker!”  He can tell she’s a little surprised to see him in the hoverchair, but she doesn't bring it up.  “It is so good to see you, I was very worried about you both.”

“You think you were worried?  I almost had a heart attack when I first got your message!” Ahsoka enthuses while Anakin and Barriss clasp forearms.  “How have you been, and what did you want to show us?”

“I’ve been well, except for—well, the answer to your second question.  It’s a long story; ah, why don't you come through here and I’ll explain.”

She leads them in a swishing of dark robes through the hallway and into the room with the cots, which turns out to be wider and more open than Anakin figured from what they could see in the doorway.  The left two thirds of the room host sixteen patient beds, eight with their heads backed against the wall with the doorway in it and eight against the opposite wall.  The other side of the room is mostly empty, with some more large medical devices in one corner, a respectably sized bacta tank, and plenty of room for the MRI machine from the front to be rolled in.  Similarly, all of the patient beds are empty except one; there's a second clone in a nondescript poncho and work pants sitting on the side of the second-to-the-last bed against the opposite wall.  He’s clean-shaven like the clone who came in with them, but with large geometric marks tattooed on both cheeks.  He’s also emanating an odd miasma of negative emotion in the Force.  Barriss leads them straight over to the foot of his cot.

“Ahsoka, Master Skywalker, this is Lieutenant Garbo.  Garbo, these are my friends from the Temple.”

Lt. Garbo almost falls out of the cot in his haste to stand and salute them.  “Commander, General, sirs!  I’m sorry, I didn't realize Barriss’s friends were, uh—”

“At ease, Lieutenant,” Anakin says to relieve the clearly flummoxed man of the need to finish that sentence.  “Not that it isn't nice to meet you, but are you a patient of Barriss’s or…?”

“Lt. Garbo is the key to what I figured out,” Barriss takes over, clearly impatient to get into things.  “Master Skywalker, pay attention to what he’s feeling in the Force.  Ahsoka, you can try too, but I’m not sure if you'll get it; a few levels deeper in meditation you may, but if my theory is correct….”

Anakin narrows his eyes and focuses, trying to tease out the currents of the man’s—“Oh.”  He blinks and drops a hand to his ‘saber, suddenly much more on guard.  “Lieutenant, is there a reason you want to kill me that badly?”  

The lieutenant colors and looks like he might burst into tears any moment, but makes no other threatening moves; indeed, Anakin can tell when he focuses that the clone is genuinely embarrassed.  But the low-level killing intent is very much there, like lightning crackling through a plasma of mortal fear and distrust and confusion.

“Begging your pardon, General, but I can't help it.”

Anakin really doesn't like not being able to stand and shift in front of Ahsoka right now.  His eyes flick between Garbo and Barriss.  “Explain.”

“...I’m defective,” Garbo admits.  Anakin knows enough about Kamino to know this is a very hard thing to admit, even if Garbo weren't staining the whole room plum-purple with fear and shame.  “It started with—so, when my unit was first introduced to our general, I remember all my brothers were speculating about whether she’d be a good field commander or seemed sympathetic, and all I could think was that she was clearly a traitor and I needed to kill her, that I was supposed to for some reason.  I don't know what I'd have done if my brothers hadn't talked me out of it, told me it was a delusion, must be some sort of defect.  They’ve been trying on the down-low to find me an unaffiliated mindhealer ever since.”

“And that's how we met,” Barriss picks up, “about a tenday ago.  I’ve been running this clinic for an old contact of my master’s who recently…became unavailable.  Most of my patients are troopers from the barracks, but I don't advertise that I am a Jedi on sabbatical to patients who find me outside of official GAR pathways, and that's how the Lieutenant’s brothers found me.  He asked me for help with strange nightmares and violent urges, but understandably didn't want to go into detail; we should thank the Force that I mentioned I was a Jedi during our consultation, since it triggered the urge and alerted me to the oddness of his case.  Even then, I don't think I would have noticed what was wrong if I hadn't become more attuned to negative emotions—my own destructive passions and those of others—over the last few months of, ah, personal experimentation.”

“You're right,” Ahsoka confirms, brow furrowed; “I can barely feel it now that I’m looking for it, but I wouldn't have caught it otherwise.  Lieutenant, you're shielding pretty well for a non-sensitive and it's weirdly, like, sublimated…. Well, I guess if the Jedi could sense every bit of ill-will that easily, we'd never get jumped.”

Barriss nods.  The Lieutenant picks up the story again here: “Commander Offee figured out that something about my urges seemed forced, or sort of external to me, to—my soul, I guess?  You can ask her for those details, but she offered me an MRI, and when that didn't show anything, we went to—”

“—A friend of my master’s through Master Vos who would prefer for their name not to be spread since they are not entirely, ah, ‘on the level’—”

“—Right, sorry, Commander.  Anyway, she was able to get me an atomic brain scan, up to Level 5.  And that's when we found it: There's a weird piece of brain tissue in my right frontal lobe, with—well, I know the broad strokes, but you should take this part, Commander.”

“Yes, I’ll stick to the broad strokes as well, but basically, we concluded it was a sort of organic chip.  Its DNA doesn't match the Lieutenant’s, doesn't match that of any of the clones, and structurally, it very much resembles a holocomputer microchip.  Most certainly programmable , and connected to multiple portions of the brain.”

(...There's a sort of rushing sound in Anakin’s ears, a narrowing of his focus, that started the moment she said “chip.”  Like the dark waters of the Force around him, in him, are beginning to churn.)

“Naturally we were suspicious, so he recruited his brother Threads so we could scan him as well.  Oh, I apologize: This is Gunnery Sergeant Threads, you've already met.”  She indicates the very quiet clone who met them at the entrance.  He offers an awkward shoulder-height wave and goes back to being inconspicuous in the face of the present revelations.  “As awful as it is to contemplate, we found exactly what we expected.  It’s not just Garbo, it’s everyone .  We have to assume the whole GAR has them.”

Anakin doesn't even think to acknowledge Threads’ wave.  “What exactly are these chips for,” he growls.  “What are they capable of?  Remote detonation?  Or—not detonation, I guess, but shutting down the brain?”

Garbo, if possible, pales further.  “I don’t—I don't know about that.  The angle we've been looking at is—well, so I’d never heard of a chip, but after we found it I talked to some of the older brothers, the early command generation, and a few of them remembered being told about a chip for emotional regulation.  Minor hormone work, they thought; fear suppression, sociability bumps, to make them better soldiers.”

“And if the only symptom Garbo experienced from the defect in his were bouts of undirected aggression, I might have believed that,” Barriss notes clinically.  “But his urge to kill is very specifically directed—at Jedi and at a handful of politicians he's met or seen on the Holonet—and is accompanied by a delusion, the conviction that these people have betrayed the Republic.  That does not sound like an emotion regulation chip to me.”

“Mind control,” Ahsoka breathes, her pupils narrowing in agitation.

…There is a moment of terrible silence.

On the plus side, the horror of the thing is significant enough to quiet some of the rushing in Anakin’s head, though the Force around them keeps churning with what he now recognizes as a prophecy too massive to feel in its entirety.  The hair on the back of his neck rises as he braces against the eddies of a larger, invisible undertow.  He is lightheaded and oddly aware of his hands.  “So someone wants to force the clones to kill Jedi,” he says slowly.  “Someone has been planning to do that since years before the war even began.”

“To kill the Jedi and select politicians,” Barriss corrects, fidgeting with her sleeves.  “Or at least they want the option.”

“Who would know about the chips?” Ahsoka wonders with a sort of morbid fascination in her voice.  “More than a few Kaminoans must know, if they told the older clones about the chips, unless they thought they were telling the truth about the emotion thing.  They probably did, actually; I hate to give Kaminoans credit like that, but if they knew the real purpose I bet they never would have mentioned it.  But at least a few of them knew, the ones who gave the orders and designed the chips.”

“The brothers I talked to said they thought the Jedi knew,” Garbo offers as if this isn't one of the worst things Anakin’s heard in a lifetime of hearing awful things.  “It should've been part of our specs handed over when the first batch were delivered.”

“The Jedi did not, in fact, know about this,” Barriss fills in before the tinnitus can pick back up too much.  “I made discreet inquiries through Master Nu; there's nothing at all in our records, and she'd never heard of it through the Council either.  And the troopers were never informed that mind-altering technology implanted without consent is highly illegal in the Republic for any sentient life, regardless of origin.  Yes, Kamino wasn't part of the Republic then, but still—it seems a lot of people were not informed of things as they should have been.”

Something about that pattern of omission niggles at Anakin, reminds him of something he heard recently, but he's too worked up to give it much thought.  “We need to get them all out.  Immediately,” he stresses, pushing both hands through his hair and feeling a manic, impossible urge to pace.  “Are they removable?  The Lieutenant still has his?”

“Yes, that's the main thing we've been working on since we realized what they were several days ago,” Barriss says.  “But it’s been difficult; my studies have not exactly extended to neurosurgery.  Designing a procedure like this—I don't trust myself, even Force-assisted.”  She pins all of them with a dark look then, her hands stilling.  “So the question is, who can we trust?”

“Well of course, I mean, the Temple—” Ahsoka begins and then cuts herself off, her sudden silence speaking volumes.  She’s grabbed the left sleeve of his robe at some point, bunched it in her hand, and at this he feels the tips of her claws poke through, sharp points against his skin.

“...The clones,” Anakin says after a moment, “but delicate neurosurgery isn't part of the standard medic training.  My lead medic in the 501st, Kix, I bet he could help at least, he's taken a lot of supplementary courses on the Holonet….”

“Yes, you should ask him, sir,” Lt. Garbo agrees after a moment.  “The medics all know each other, at least within generations; if he can't do it, he'll know someone who can.”

“Could we hire someone?  Through Senator Amidala, maybe, and pay them for their silence?  The man who ran this clinic before me—or, no, he's, ah, in prison,” Barriss remembers, flushing green.  “And I suppose even a handsomely paid contractor is never truly trustworthy.”

“It's a good option for if we can't find a clone medic to plan the operation and do the first few tests,” Anakin decides.  “Any Jedi we don't know well are too close, I think.  I mean, the GAR was commissioned by a member of the High Council.”  And oh, how his blood boils at the implications there.  “But that's just figuring out how to remove one ; to remove them from the whole damn GAR, how the kriff would you even manage that?!”

“Talk to Kix,” Ahsoka reiterates after a moment of thought.  “Put him in touch with Barriss.  They know more about the medical resources the GAR has available here and on the other hub planets and stations they’re mustering to.”  Anakin filled her in on both Padme and Rex’s angles on the barracks problem during the ride over.

“Right, good thought,” Anakin says, freeing his  partially shredded left sleeve from her grip so he can reach up and give her an absentminded noogie of approval.  It speaks to the seriousness of the situation that she doesn't fight it or yowl her usual complaint.  “I have a contact at the Senate I trust implicitly; I bet she can help us look into the source.  And we’ll want to loop in Obi-Wan; this has to tie into the investigation he's already working on.”  Looping in Obi-Wan was a foregone conclusion, really, for something this big, but that angle makes it even more urgent.

“Another investigation?” Barriss asks.

“...Yes, into the Sith Lord Count Dooku said held power over the Senate,” Ahsoka catches on.  “Oh, Force , Skyguy, you think—?  Well, I guess it's obvious, really.  Kriff.”

“Obi-Wan has always been suspicious about Sifo-Dyas and the origins of the GAR since the beginning—I mean, everyone has, a little bit, but investigations haven't really been a priority.”  Be nice about the Council, the kids still like the Council.   “And Barriss, I don't know if Luminara ever told you this, but Dooku told Obi-Wan way back at the start of the war that there’s a secret Sith Lord holding power over the Senate.  A lot of the Council thinks it was just Seppie propaganda, but for a while now there's been something wrong with the way the Senate behaves.  Weird factions appearing unpredictably, people switching sides at the last minute on key issues, deadlocking votes…and on the rare occasions the military oversight committees actually get off their asses and do something, it never makes sense; it's a miracle we won the war with all the stupid damn orders we’ve gotten.  The Chancellor does his best, but….”  Well, Padme is not a fan of where his thoughts about democracy go past that point, so he lets it lie.

“Really, there's something wrong with this whole war,” Ahsoka says pensively, before clearly hearing herself and hurrying to backtrack. “Beyond, y’know, normal war things.  I believed Obi-Wan about the Sith because he’s Obi-Wan, but now I’m starting to see it for myself as well.  It's just too… weird ,” she settles on with a grimace at the inadequacy of it.

The churning in the Force has become almost impossible to ignore.  He can tell Barriss and Ahsoka are starting to feel it, too.  It’s like the feeling just before the precognition of his own death screams through him, multiplied by a million; like the death of…like the death of….

“We need to remove those chips,” Barriss summarizes.  “As quickly as possible.  But very quietly .”

It takes another hour for the five of them to lay out a basic plan: Who they’re going to involve, when they can contact them, and what channels are and aren’t safe enough.  They can’t meet like this again, without a go-between or pretext.  Once was bad enough, and Anakin is both relieved and longing for his armor when the time comes for them to retreat to their speeder; random snipers are an unfortunately well-documented weakness of Jedi Knights.  They say their goodbyes at the secret backdoor, Ahsoka once more hugging her friend with visibly crushing strength.  Pulling away, she adds, with mustered cheer, “And Barriss, you liar, I can't believe you told me you weren't in danger.  You’re in, like, six different kinds of danger!!” 

“I didn't want to worry you!  And I thought it would look suspicious if you rushed over to see me too soon after arriving on-planet.”  She pauses.  “But yes, I rather think you're right.”

/B/

They’ve decided that they should proceed on the assumption that Anakin and Ahsoka, at least, are being monitored in some way.  That means as little deviation as possible from their regular habits and schedules.  Anakin and Ahsoka were already planning to eat dinner with Obi-Wan tomorrow night after Anakin’s afternoon PT appointment and Ahsoka’s classes, so although they chafe at the delay, that's the best time to loop him in on it.  And Anakin has an actual, public date planned with Padme the next morning—“breakfast with a friend,” sure, but now that he’s home for good, he can tell Padme is growing as impatient with hiding from the tabloids as he is—so he can pull her in then as well.  Once Anakin has had dinner with Obi-Wan, he'll also have the excuse of having passed on Rex’s questions about the muster crisis, so he can head back to the barracks first thing after his date; going two days in a row would be too odd.  Anakin chafes at the delay, but while the chips are a terrifying thing to have hanging over their heads (and a horrifying, ongoing violation of the clones’ personhood), the mysterious architect didn't use them in any of the two and a half years of war when the Jedi were spread across the galaxy at their most vulnerable.  It would be odd for them to decide to use them right now; realistically, the Jedi in the Temple now could probably hold it for months, even against a surprise attack, easily long enough to evacuate and either disappear or establish a base to strike back—even assuming the riot-happy citizens of Coruscant, always more hostile to clones than Jedi, wouldn’t come to their aid.  It would be a terribly timed, unnecessarily arduous undertaking for a schemer who clearly plans on a scale of decades.  The architect has to be waiting for something, some new disaster, and doesn't that make Anakin’s blood curdle.

Obi-Wan takes the news in stride when they read him in over a hearty vegetable stew that evening.  It would almost make Anakin angry, how quickly he seems to regain his calm, but he gets it, to some extent.  After all they’ve seen (and done), the actions both sides have taken in this war, it's really not all that surprising.  And, as Obi-Wan sighs out after suggesting some tweaks to their mass-surgery action plans, “I suppose all there is to do is to press on.  As always.”

The next morning, Anakin comms Padme to change the location of their date to Dex’s.  She's not a big fan of the food, and they both know it, but he’s also mentioned to her before how strictly Dex runs his no-microphone, no-camera establishment, so she picks up on his meaning and agrees without any incriminating confusion over comms.  Cleverest person he knows, by ten klicks.  Stars and galaxies, he loves this woman.

This is more or less still the thought jostling the rest out of his head as he ushers her through the low metal doorway an hour later, watching the sway of her hips beneath her sensible (for Padme) draping tunic.  Heads turn to watch them come in, and Anakin and Padme exchange glances on the way to the counter, suppressing disbelieving laughter at the feeling of being seen together, and not caring.  Sure, it's just breakfast at a spot the press already knows Anakin frequents with friends and associates, and they're not going to do anything untoward, but still.  He's so ready to have this every day.

But they can't savor the feeling too long; regrettably, he changed their venue for a reason, and an urgent one.  They order and take a seat in the furthest corner booth, wholly out of earshot of other patrons and with their faces not visible through any windows.  Anakin almost starts the real conversation then, but Padme, better versed in domestic spycraft than he is, keeps them on friendly small talk until their orders have been called and the two parties nearest to them have left.  Only then does she lean forward and lower her voice in a way that makes his skin tingle.  Individual hairs have drifted out of her artfully loose braid, and her features seem to glow in the semi-dimness as she asks, “Did Rex say anything new about the clone encampments, the orders they're getting?  We’ve managed to convince a handful more Inner Rim worlds to sign on to the current resettlement plan, but the Mid Rim is still giving us trouble; we’ve had a hell of a time convincing them this isn't the federal government trying to consolidate power by stationing a fifth column in their midst, and I can't even blame them.  It would help a great deal if you could tell me that isn't the case.”

She looks beautiful, sitting there with loose hairs dipping in her salad, and it gives him real pain to douse the hope shining from her face.  He’s…okay, yeah, he’s also not really listening to her, jumping ahead in the conversation to the much scarier recent discovery.  “Oh, right, uhh, Rex is stressed, but that's not actually what I need to tell you about.  There’s something way worse going on.”  And Anakin explains about the bio-organic chip.

And Padme, this woman who's thrown herself into danger as long as he’s known her, looks at him with open fear in her eyes.  “Oh, gods, Anakin…” she says tightly.  “You don't actually think—the concentration of clones on the most politically influential or—or militarized planets….”

….

Oh, kriff.

/B/

So it turns out the architect probably is planning to use the chips.  And soon.  Really, it’s so obvious in retrospect, but even knowing what they know, it's just so hard for the Jedi to think of the clones as enemies.  But still, Anakin tells himself when he’s trying to sleep at night: It’s not exactly the Jedi way to be arrogant, but frankly, there are a lot of Jedi—not nearly as many as there were before the war, but now with a kriffton of military experience.  He thinks of the Council hunting down Krell; a solid battalion of trained Jedi fighting together really is a match for most armies thirty times their size, as long as those armies are organic and thus highly vulnerable to Force manipulation.  An army of Jedi?  It would be sheer carnage.  Not to mention much of the Republic would almost certainly support them, riding the wave of positive emotion after the end of the war and the undercurrent of anti-clone chauvinism.  The mind-controlled clones would still need some sort of gimmick, maybe some new, awful weapon, maybe a frame-up of some kind to turn Coruscant against them, maybe a man on the inside—was that supposed to be Krell?

Rex swears a blue streak when Anakin manages to pull him into a signal dead zone in the barracks that afternoon, and demands to be read in on everything immediately.  (Anakin has never seen him quite like this before and has to assure himself very firmly that he isn't a little intimidated.)  Kix, the real lynchpin of their plan, goes eerily silent and has illegally downloaded two textbooks from the holonet by the time Anakin leaves the building.  “Never looked forward to doing a surgical procedure before, much less two million of ‘em,” he remarks tersely.  “Guess there's a first time for everything.”

By the end of the second day, after much fevered consultation with the several hundred other clone medics on base and Duchess Satine’s trusted personal physician—who arrived just the day before on an impromptu “vacation” to Coruscant—the very first de-chipping surgery has been completed, with no immediate side effects.  The brave volunteer for this first procedure is Gunnery Sergeant Threads, since he successfully argues his brother Garbo can't go first because his chip is malfunctioning, so he's not a standard test case.  Garbo, reluctantly, is the fifth.  He later reports to Barriss with a wondering smile that he felt like he stood up from that table a whole new man from when he lay down on it.

Information spreads from person to person like neurons firing, through the GAR and within the smaller network of their allies.  Every member of their growing cabal immediately agrees that they need to accelerate their investigation, as much as extreme caution allows.  They confirm from newly declassified records of the clones’ commissioning—provided by Padme, who's been involved, among ten thousand other things, in the demilitarization of Kamino—that most of the cloners really did think the chip was meant to regulate emotions.  Padme, her staff of handmaidens, and Obi-Wan spend a lot more free evenings together after that, something Anakin would be jealous of if he didn't know from many caf runs that they spend this time buried in decades of triple-encrypted flimsiwork.  (Well, he's still a little jealous, but not enough to pick up a datapad himself.)

Their goal is to figure out who made the request to integrate the chip, trying to trace that or the Senate’s mysterious resettlement deadlocks back to the senator or senators planning the coup-slash-attempted religious purge looming on the horizon.  It quickly becomes clear that this goes high.  High enough to fund an endless chain of shell corporations.  High enough not to leave fingerprints.  Every day, Anakin finds it harder to look members of the High Council in the eye as, by daylight, he resumes regular temple duties (adjusted so he can perform them in the hoverchair), and at night, he gives himself migraines figuring out how to acquire 15,000 liters of high-grade local anesthetics and channel them in the right proportions to Corellia and Alderaan without anyone noticing.  Ahsoka, who can flit about visiting her various friends least suspiciously, is an indefatigable courier and agent.

“Is it too much to ask for every conspiracy in this damn galaxy not to be part of one big conspiracy?” Anakin whines two weeks in, because Obi-Wan raised him so he’s a complainer at heart.  “Could this bantha-fucker not leave some plotting for the rest of us?”

“I mean, you could argue that what we’re doing now is a counter-conspiracy,” Ahsoka offers.

“Sure, but I hate playing defense.”

The men of Krell’s old battalion, the 246th, are quick to trust the 501st when first contacted on Alderaan by one of Bail Organa’s agents, whose services are generously lent to Padme with minimal explanation required.  (Anakin is still angry he was blocked from folding the 246th into the 501st before the war’s end, though given the loss of Executor Battalion in the space battle over Arami, Obi-Wan would say it was the will of the Force.)  In the unique position of lacking a general, much of the 246th has been divided among the too-few mobile supply and medical ships supporting the metastasizing barracks on the handful of targeted worlds, so they turn out to be uniquely positioned to spread the word, the surgical diagrams, and Anakin, Rex, and Cody’s dubiously sourced or embezzled surgical supplies discreetly around the GAR as a whole.

During a brief window when he's on Coruscant, Rex reports, one lieutenant of the 246th also shares something else: advice.  “He said they had a general who could read their minds, or their emotions at least, and wanted any excuse to hurt them,” Rex relays.  “So they figured out how to sort of shut everything down, so they wouldn't set him off.  Make themselves unreadable.”

“Shielding,” Anakin realizes.  “Yeah, that's definitely a good thing for you all to pick up if we’re going to be fighting some ancient evil Sith, and he’s right that you don't need to be Force-sensitive for it.  Ahsoka and I can help with that too, teach workshops or something every time we visit.”  The men of Torrent take to shielding like ducks to water; pretty soon, they’re shielding almost as well as the average Jedi (and better than some, Ahsoka teases with unnecessarily ruthless glee).

So all in all, it’s been a rather productive few weeks.  And yet, for all that, they're missing something.  The investigation still refuses to yield up a name.  Or rather, it yields up many, many names that, followed back toward their presumed anchor points, dwindle instead into anonymous credit deposits and midnight hours unaccounted for and unrecorded: loose ends waving in the wind, never connecting to anything concrete.  It feels like all the pieces are within reach, dangling tauntingly close within the great silk-soft web closing in on them, but they still haven't spotted the spider.

/B/

Three tendays and 30,000 successful neurosurgeries into the new, fragile peace, Anakin is finishing his PT exercises in his room when the Chancellor’s secretary comms, inviting him to a Mon Calamari opera.  He’s seen ads for it on the holonet, memorable mostly because of the unlikely, perhaps intentionally ironic title of Squid Lake.  Mon Cal humor tends to go over his head.

It's short notice, only a day out, but he smothers the surprisingly strong surge of irritation, figuring the Chancellor is a much busier man than him and anyway, he should be flattered his old mentor wants to spend time with him at all.  He’s not sure why the Chancellor still bothers with him; sure, he impressed him as a nine-year-old, but while he's confident in his short-term battlefield tactics, he's never truly managed to absorb the large-scale lessons in politics and history the old man’s done his best to impart.  The Chancellor has the patience of a Jedi grandmaster, but everyone gives up eventually, and it's not like Anakin has a winning personality.

Once again, on the morning of, he vacillates for hours over using the hoverchair.  He knows, logically, that the Chancellor won't mock him for an injury gained in the protection of the Republic, but something about the idea just bothers him so much that he has to half-ass the hangar security shift he bartered from Aayla Secura, ducking into a back room to calm down his breathing.  In the end, he loses his battle with himself and requisitions hydraulic leg braces from some clearly disapproving but intimidated medic padawans, and then spends an hour figuring out how to walk in them, most certainly fucking his legs even further in the process.  They’ll be transitioning him to these in another tenday anyways, he reasons, and he’s always healed fast.

Thus armed and armored, he ends the one nerve-wracking youngling meditation class he couldn't beg, barter, or steal his way out of leading a few minutes early (someone’s going to yell at him for that), leaves a note for Ahsoka, and heads to the hangar.  Parking under the opera house is a bitch, so at least that's a good sign for the quality of the production, though looking at a few of these million-credit scrap heaps Coruscanti socialites call speeders, he reconsiders crediting their owners’ taste.

Cursing himself the whole way up the concrete staircase from the garage (why??), Anakin emerges, blinking, into the top-layer sunlight.  He easily spots the Chancellor standing about twenty feet across the pavement, flanked by two red-cloaked commandos of his security team.  The Chancellor turns as if sensing his arrival.  “Ah, Anakin, my boy!  It's been a while, hasn't it?”

“Chancellor!” Anakin greets him happily, closing in for a warm handshake.  He hesitates, though, as they close the distance—something feels wrong in the Force, feels—he almost fumbles the left-handed handshake.  He refocuses on the man in front of him, feeling large and clumsy and nervous.  “How are you doing, sir?  War treating you more or less like the rest of us?”

The Chancellor chuckles.  “I’m afraid so, Anakin. I know you’ll be shocked to hear this, but I found a gray hair in the mirror today.  Who could've imagined?”

Anakin laughs weakly, but he's distracted once again by the something he feels in the Force.  He's almost certain of it this time: There's some sort of Dark presence or residue in the vicinity.  It smells-sounds-tastes just like what he felt from Krell, what he trained himself to seek out psychically across the huge, crowded temple in order to send him nightmares.  Only here it’s not so much rotten eggs as old, dried blood on stone, the smell of mildew on a rusty drain, the irritating beeping of a poison gas detector far off and muffled faint.  The stillness of a predator in muddy waters.  He glances around furtively, searching for anyone suspicious.

“—And the opposition is always stalling, they're just not men of action like we—Anakin, are you listening?”

Anakin starts; the cutting edge to the Chancellor’s tone is not out of character, but unexpected.  “Yes, I apologize.  You said you're having trouble with a supply requisitions bill?”

“Yes, those gentlepeople from Ryloth simply don't understand the demands of war.  We all have to make sacrifices, of course, but when so many of us are sacrificing our very lives on the battlefield, surely it's reasonable to ask a bit more from those whose freedom we are safeguarding.”

Anakin nods amenably, but internally he’s letting his presence pool out a bit further, sinking a few layers deeper into the Force, and there it is again! —a faint coppery hint of Darkness.  Anakin swings fully around this time, searching the rooftops for its source.  He feels the Chancellor pause beside him, laying a hand on his arm.  “Dear boy, what in the galaxy are you looking for?”

Anakin takes a protective step in front of his friend, eyes still darting around the empty street.  “I, ahh.  Don't want to alarm you, Chancellor, but I’m feeling some kind of Dark presence?  It's very faint, but I—oh, huh, it's gone.”

Chancellor Palpatine hrmms wisely.  “It was faint, you said?  I’m sure it was nothing to be truly concerned about.  At the moment, I’ll admit I’m most concerned about missing the opera….”

“Oh, sorry, yes, let’s hurry.”  Anakin cringes, embarrassed to have made this important, overworked man wait.  (Though the opera doesn't start for another fifteen minutes?  Maybe he has the time wrong.  That's probably it, he's hopeless at keeping a schedule….)

They make it to the opera house with enough time to linger in the lobby and chat for a bit before the show starts.  As usual, Anakin has no luck getting the eerily silent security team to join the small talk; Jesse mentioned once that those guys are weird, but he supposes they're just being professional.  As they stroll under the gilded arch leading to the balcony access corridor, the Chancellor gestures languidly to his own eyes.  “You're going to keep those on?” he says politely but somehow also with a distinct air of judgement, and Anakin cringes again.

“Uh, yeah—yes, I’ve been having some trouble with light sensitivity, from, uh.  Explosions?”

The Chancellor nods sagely.  “Ah, I see.  I had wondered, from the paparazzi photos.”

“The—?”

“Let's get to our seats, shall we?”  And the Chancellor sweeps ahead of him, leaving Anakin hobbling and cursing himself in his wake.

The opening of the opera is about what Anakin expected: A number of Mon Cals in funny felt outfits joining one by one into a highly dramatized argument involving a lot of singing and hand gestures.  Some of them stand on the edge of the stage while others lean out of a large water tank that extends outward on an elevated platform, dividing the house in two.  Periodically, the audience titters at a joke he didn't really grasp.  He’s just never been much of a liberal arts guy, and it's really hard to read the respectfully dimmed subtitles scrolling across the screen on the railing of their box while wearing sun goggles.  He’s tempted to take them off, but he doesn't know if the yellow eyes are activated by extreme boredom.

Still, the plush red leather seats are a mercy for his screaming ankles and knees, and it does get more interesting when the air and water acrobatics start.  Anakin is surprised to find that he’s actually been sucked in when, maybe thirty minutes into the show, the Chancellor clears his throat next to him.  “Anakin, did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?”

Absorbed in trying to understand the lead acrobat’s enthusiastic gesturing, Anakin replies absently, “Ah, yeah, why do you ask?”

“I thought not, it's not a—what?”

“Hm?  Oh—”  Anakin refocuses at the confusion in the Chancellor’s tone, abruptly realizing that he sort of shouldn't know that story.  He turns to face his interlocutor, eyes wide.  “Oh, I mean I know a story about a Darth Plagueis, you know, uh, Jedi love a library, you hear things here and there….”  Wait a minute.  “You know a story about a Sith Lord?  Where’d you hear it, Chancellor?”  He supposes he doesn't remember where Barriss picked it up, assuming she ever told him.  Maybe it's just a folktale from somewhere?

“Oh, let's not talk about me,” the Chancellor says smoothly, with an odd coldness in his voice that raises the hairs on the back of Anakin’s neck.  “You know, my boy, you've seemed different since you returned.  More…confident.”

“Really?”  Anakin’s never been accused of a lack of confidence; much the opposite, really.  Maybe that's why the Chancellor makes it sound like a bad thing.  “I, ah, I suppose I’m just relieved the war’s over, sir.  Everyone’s loosening up somewhat, despite things still being up in the air.”  Spotting an opportunity to further the investigation, he leans a bit more over his right elbow braced on the arm of his chair, ignoring the odd chiming in the Force, and ventures, “Actually, Chancellor, I’ve been meaning to ask: Do you know why it’s taking so long to figure out where the GAR will be settled in the long term?  The guys in the barracks here are pretty stressed.”

“If you don't mind, my boy, I prefer not to talk politics during my limited free time,” the Chancellor says archly, and immediately Anakin is flooded with shame, shrinking back into his seat.  Of course, what was he thinking, trying to take advantage of their personal relationship like that?  The Chancellor probably deals with this constantly; he doesn't want the old man to think he only spends time with him for proximity to power.

“Of course, sir, I’m sorry about that,” he walks it back, mouth dry.  “I wasn't trying to—it’s just something that's been taking up a lot of my time, helping with supply requisitions.  It’s on my mind.  I didn't mean to interrogate you or anything.”

“Ahh, I see.  No offense taken, I promise,” the old man chuckles, and at once Anakin can breathe again.  “Actually, I suppose I’m a hypocrite, as I have a political question I’ve been meaning to ask you, as well: Did the late Count Dooku tell you anything interesting, before he passed?  Anything that would help with our investigation into the people behind the early Separatist agitation and funding?  To ensure that this war can never reignite, we really must track the corruption to its source.”

Honestly, Anakin hates the Seppies as much as anyone, but he’s not sure “corruption” is a word he'd use; it's not like those pricks in the Separatist Senate were all that much more bribe-happy than their own.  In some ways, their objections to the Republic were pretty reasonable.  But the Chancellor doesn't want to hear that, obviously.  “Did the High Council not send you my and Obi-Wan’s debriefing, sir?  Obi-Wan’s a lot better at remembering people’s exact words than I am, I've got to admit.”

“Oh yes, I did read over that.  But I was wondering if there was anything you might have, hmm, neglected to mention.  After all, we both know the High Council can be a little…biased, shall we say?”

Once again, inexplicably, the Force pulses alarm.  What??

…Pushing aside his initial, odd reaction, Anakin is impressed with the Chancellor’s intuition, to read between the lines that well from just a transcript.  He supposes that’s why he’s the Chancellor; he’s always been good at seeing to the heart of things, at giving Anakin the kind of clearheaded advice the Jedi feel the need to shroud in mumbo jumbo, if they offer answers at all.  Ever since he was a kid, the Chancellor has been a person he could come to when he was feeling confused or frustrated or afraid, feelings Obi-Wan disapproved of and, Anakin realized as he got older, was often bewildered by.  The Chancellor has always brought a grounded, nonjudgmental perspective that no one else in his life was offering.  And there’s plenty in his current situation to be afraid of and frustrated by.  Maybe the Chancellor could help?

And really, it's not like there's any harm in the Chancellor knowing about his late Sithly inclinations.  The Chancellor wouldn't rat him out to the High Council; he’s expressed confusion multiple times about the difference between Dark and Light in the first place and why Jedi act like Falling is the end of the world.  Can’t people just have different perspectives?

Really, it’d be hard to find a more open-minded listening ear than the Chancellor—who really should know about the clone control chips too, he remembers with a start—and with that, Anakin opens his mouth to tell him the whole story.

And…

stops.  Something stops him.

The Force is so heavy around him, and yet for some reason, it feels far away.  Muffled, sort of.  It gets that way sometimes, when he's feeling stressed, retreating rather than sharpening.  But for a moment, even through that cotton-pad barrier, he could swear he feels the breath of the dragon on his back, from the darkness, just like he did in that tunnel on Gamorr.

And so instead, not fully understanding himself, Anakin clears his throat.  Smiles.  “Nope, sorry, Chancellor, Dooku didn't say anything that interesting.”

“Hmm.”  The Chancellor regards him for a long moment.  “Well.  I apologize, we’re missing half the show!  We’ll speak more about this another time, my boy.”

Anakin’s smile twitches.

/B/

What saves Anakin’s life that day is that he is not the sharpest tool in the hangar.

He’s not stupid by any means, though with the company he keeps, he often feels like it.  He’s great with engineering and complex physics, breezing through academic courses if he has any interest whatsoever in their subjects.  He’s also quick on his feet in a crisis, with a reactive cleverness that lends itself to bursts of creative tactical insight.  But in terms of deductive reasoning, social intelligence, the kinds of skills that lend themselves to fiddly logical puzzle-solving, he’s long been aware that he lags behind the average.

And it is this particular deficit that saves him, because instead of piecing things together in the opera house (and it was a three-hour marathon of a performance), he’s thirty blocks away buying chips in a convenience store when it finally hits him.

Why would the Chancellor know the tale of Darth Plagueis the Wise?

Why would he ask about it?

Who was near him the entire time he was sensing a Dark presence outside the opera house?

Who would have the influence and authority to deadlock the Senate and concentrate the clones on Coruscant?

Who had access to the kind of insider information it felt like the Seps were constantly blindsiding them with no matter how many leaks the Republic plugged?

Who could be best described as “controlling the Republic” with “hundreds of senators under his influence”?

And, last and most terrifyingly obvious in its simplicity:

Who’s gained the most from the war they just ended?

The tingling numbness starts at his extremities; his tinnitus surges in tandem to eclipse external noise.  Anakin glances at his left hand and distantly notes that it’s shaking.

The Chancellor is the Sith Lord.

The Chancellor is the Sith Lord .

He hears the pop of a small explosion and almost dives for cover before the soft rain of crumbs in the corner of his vision alerts him: He's crushed the chip bag he was holding in his prosthetic.

The galaxy is absolutely fucking kriffed.

Chapter Text

Obi-Wan is sitting with his back to his desk, taking a rare moment of leisure in the light of a single desklamp.  He’s browsing idly through holonovels in the Jedi database when Anakin bursts through the door, looking more wild-eyed and manic than Obi-Wan has seen him in some time.  Since before Ahsoka, even.  Obi-Wan is instantly on high alert, suppressing their bond for focus, the instinctive reserve of surface calm he developed for just these situations wrapping him in cold clarity like a friend with a blanket.

“Obi-Wan,” his padawan says, flesh knee and fingers flexing frantically in the way that signals a grueling effort to stand still.  “I need you to tell me I’m wrong.”

“You—what?”

Anakin makes an unintelligible noise of frustration and loses his battle against his own energy, beginning to pace in figure-eights across the small space of the living room, gesturing.  “You can do that, yes?  You're good at that, yes?  You love doing that, you do it all the time.  So if you’ve ever in your life known me to be wrong, I need you to tell me now.”  He punctuates this last declaration by abruptly turning and resting his forehead on his forearms against the opposite wall.

It takes Obi-Wan a few seconds to parse that, and he's still not sure he understands at the end of those seconds.  “Wrong about what, dear one?  You want me to disagree with you about something; did you learn something that upset you?”  Eyeing his padawan’s back with a sinking sensation, he hesitates and risks, “Did you…do something?”

That particular addition backfires spectacularly.  Anakin whips around with his eyes wide, and the air pressure in the room increases noticeably as he prowls a few steps forward.  “Did I—why do you always assume I did something?  What is so fucking wrong with me that I—but that's the problem, isn't it,” he interjects with an air of abrupt revelation.  The pacing resumes with increasing violence in the small space.  “Something made him choose me, way back when—and who knows what he’s, since then, I don't know what he’s—”

“Padawan, you need to…” Obi-Wan almost says calm down but course-corrects at the last moment.  “You need to tell me what you might be wrong about before I can make a judgment.  If it has you this troubled, I’m sure I’ll likely give you the answer you’re asking for.  Just take a few deep breaths, perhaps, and then try me.”

For a moment, Anakin stares at him like he’s grown lekku, but then he actually makes a visible effort to follow Obi-Wan’s advice.  One breath.  Two breaths.  Anakin is half in shadow, bracing himself with his right hand on the protruding corner where the short, unlit entrance hall opens out into the room’s main area, and a part of Obi-Wan eyes the deepening dents in his wall with dismay.  That part is immediately forgotten about when Anakin finally manages to blurt out what he came here to say.

“I think I know who Dooku’s Darth Sidious is.”

“Okay…?”

“The Chancellor.”

The.…

“But I’m crazy, right?”  Anakin is eyeing him with visibly growing discomfort as the silence stretches.  “There's no real evidence.  Obi-Wan, tell me I’m crazy.”

Slowly, with a growing sense of detachment, Obi-Wan shakes his head.  “No, it…that actually makes a terrifying amount of sense.”

“But it can't be him,” Anakin retorts, and the sharp hysteria in his voice jerks Obi-Wan out of the mounting abstract horror of the possibility.  “Obi-Wan, it can't—I’ve known him since I was nine, I mean—I thought he was like my grandfather, and he—”

…Oh, but this is a horror.

Oh, but this is a horror far worse than the previous horror, and Obi-Wan learns that he did not know before what horror is, because the impersonal horror of suddenly seeing at a glance how the leader of your federal political body could have puppeteered both sides of a civil war, feeding billions into the meat grinder and earning for it nothing less than power and acclaim, nearly absolute power now if he twisted the reins just right—all along, that horror was merely a soap bubble, really, an ephemeron.  A paper phantasm, lacking teeth.

Because he let that man spend time with Anakin.

Reluctantly, sure, but plenty of times, all the way back to when Anakin was still just a towheaded bundle of mischief and miseries who needed to be taught how to read.  His padawan was so tiny, so vulnerable, and over and over he let that little boy walk into that big man’s office alone despite all his misgivings about politicians and older men with a suspicious interest in children, because the Council supposed it was a rare opportunity for a boy who would need all the help he could get (and a rarer opportunity still for the Order to coax support from a mercurial political powerhouse), and he asked Anakin afterwards and Anakin always defended the Chancellor so adamantly but if the man was a Sith—

Obi-Wan is suddenly certain that he will never be forgiven this as long as he lives.  It has been a while since he loathed himself with such thorough, blinding clarity, literally nauseous with hatred.

“Two months ago, I wouldn't have believed it,” Anakin is saying when he tunes back in, stumbling over his words.  His cheeks are wet.  “Hells, a month ago I wouldn't have believed it.  But I’ve been paying so much more attention to how I’m feeling, ever since—you know, and I was trying to think of all the reasons I liked him and could never believe that of him, and I found a—a pattern.  I started to see—every time I would go hang out with him as a kid, I was so excited, right?  Because it felt like he always knew just what to say, to make me feel good about—he always knew what to say.  But I always left feeling worse than when I came in.”

There’s something in his throat, Obi-Wan must be suffocating.  “Oh, my dear boy, that’s—”

“And all the problems we had with leaks of technologies?  Battle plans?  Yeah, he could get that information from a lot of places, he was the Chancellor, but also sometimes on leave he would ask me about personnel assignments and my troops’ morale and what I thought were our strengths and weaknesses and I told him, of course I told him, he was the gods-damned Chancellor, Obi-Wan, he had the clearance for it, and I was the leak!  I was one of the leaks!  And so many people died, I can't—I don't—what the fuck, Obi-Wan, I don’t—”

Obi-Wan is on his feet, now, without quite knowing how he got there.  That part comes naturally.  He realizes, however, that he has no idea what to do next.  “Anakin—Anakin, it’s okay.  It’s okay, dear one.”  Should he make tea?  Yes, perhaps he should make tea, only his old padawan is running his hands through his hair and with a start like a nightmare Obi-Wan realizes that there's a clump of hair stuck in Anakin’s ungloved metal hand—

“Padawan!” he gasps, rushing across the space between them and reaching out to grasp his wrist.  Only Anakin mistakes his intention, because suddenly his arms are full of a shaking, six-foot-tall black-robed space heater doing its level best to squeeze the life out of him.

Ah.

Um….

Faintly, the thought pops into Obi-Wan’s mind that he hasn't hugged his padawan since he was eleven years old.  Since his padawan stopped going in for hugs, that is, little by little, and Obi-Wan remembers being a little relieved because he never knew what to do with his hands.

He still doesn't know what to do with his hands.

He settles on rubbing light circles on his padawan’s back, burning revulsion creeping up from his gut at his own inadequacy.  “It’s…we can, we can fix this.  It's not too late, Padawan, it's okay….”  He briefly considers calling in Ahsoka but dismisses the thought with another shudder of self-contempt.  Yes, taking care of Ahsoka has been very good for Anakin, has mellowed him immensely and made him noticeably less self-centered, but he’s not going to call in a teenager when Anakin’s like this.

Belatedly, he glances down and notices Anakin is standing, wearing mechanized leg braces, when he really shouldn't be, and the more familiar flash of irritation and concern is enough to shake him a little more awake, prod him into action.  Herding his several-inches-taller apprentice into a chair at his (their) kitchen table is concerningly easy, now that his initial surge of manic energy seems to have burned out.

“Alright, I’m going to make tea,” Obi-Wan decides after a few seconds of Anakin not saying anything, just slumping miserably onto his crossed arms on the tabletop.  “I’ll make tea, and then perhaps you can explain what happened?  Is that alright?”  His apprentice nods slightly into his arms, more a puddle than a person, and Obi-Wan walks more briskly than usual to the cupboards to collect the teapot and Anakin’s favorite Ryloth blend.  Silence and hitched breathing fill the kitchen until they are slowly overtaken by the sound of water heating to a rolling boil.

Obi-Wan waffles briefly, and decides to portion the loose leaves into individual bags rather than properly steeping in the teapot, in the interest of time.  Sometimes Anakin, when he's like this, gets a second wind, and as alarming as Obi-Wan’s always found these slumps, they're not nearly as likely to hurt anyone as the energetic, impulsive apex of Anakin’s pendulum phases.

The shushing sound of water sloshing into two mugs pulls Obi-Wan a bit further into himself.  One by one, he plops the two little cloth bags into the water, watches them float stubbornly back to the surface before slowly sinking.  Their stain eddies out around them.  He hasn't bothered to turn on the overhead lights, just the hanging lamp over the counter; when he finally looks back over his shoulder, his eyes have adjusted to its dim orange-yellow light, and the room beyond is so much darker than he realized.  His apprentice, in his dark robes, is just an indistinct shape against a murky background.

Carefully, Obi-Wan sits down across from him at the small table, setting the first mug next to him with a soft click.  A few seconds pass, the space of a held breath, and then one pale and snakes out and pulls it closer.

“I asked Ahsoka to stay the night with Barriss,” Anakin says miserably into his mug.  “Since I know I’m….”  He trails off, his words rippling across the surface of his tea.  Obi-Wan looks politely down at the table, insides clenching too painfully at what his padawan’s face is doing.  He did this.  All Anakin’s struggles—well, not all, perhaps, but so much could have been done in those years—and he let it….

“That was a wise choice, Padawan mine,” he says lowly, instead of any of that.  “Can you tell me what happened?”

Anakin’s head is still lowered, but he sits up enough that Obi-Wan can see a glimmer of dim yellow through his lashes.  Between hitched breaths and noisy sips of poorly steeped tea, he explains what happened at the opera, and the conclusions he came to.  The last shreds of Obi-Wan’s doubt peel off and drift to the floor.

“I’m so sorry, Anakin,” Obi-Wan says at the end.  It feels inadequate.

He can no longer see Anakin’s face through the darkness and his apprentice’s dangling bangs, but the voice that responds is hoarse:

“We have to kill him now, don't we.”

For a moment, habit loads Obi-Wan’s tongue with the usual admonishments, the usual ideals, but they dissipate as soon as he moves to speak.  Yes, in an ideal world they would arrest the Sith Lord, bring him to a fair trial within the legal structures of the Republic, but there'd be no fair trial for the Chancellor even if Obi-Wan did think they could take him alive without massive casualties; he has too many friends in high places, too many debtors.  The stakes are simply too high.

(He hates how many times this war has let him convince himself of that.  Can he even call them principles anymore, with the number of caveats he’s hacked out of them?)

“I think we do,” he confirms instead, and Anakin’s face twists.  And what a reversal it is, truly, that Obi-Wan is the one on the side of extrajudicial violence.

Anakin nods once, miserably.  He takes a long, silent sip of his tea.

“Okay,” he says, “okay.”  And then his face closes down, his shoulders straighten, and the General is back in the room.

“Alright.  We don't have time to plan forever; clearly, he’s suspicious.  We need to do something now.  And we need to warn the clones of what might be coming.  We’ve gotten to thirty thousand—maybe thirty-five thousand, now—so that’s a little under two percent of the entire GAR.  Fuck, never mind, we can't act now.”

It’s a grim number.  Really, it's a wonder of logistics that the clones have managed so many already, but Obi-Wan agrees: two men in a hundred is not enough to stop a battalion on the warpath, not without deadly sabotage.  If those battalions could conveniently be in space, or on uninhabited planets, when the order came in—but no, Palpatine has them massed in centers of power and population for a reason, he won't let them escape so easily. Regardless, the two-in-a-hundred calculus assumes those who have been cured are distributed evenly across the GAR, which is decidedly not the case.  Coruscant, and specifically the capital hub, has the highest concentration of de-chipped clones and the smoothest-running surgical conveyor belt by virtue of being the first to know and the easiest to supply.  Naboo is running nearly as smoothly, and a few other easy-to-reach rich planets, but on planets that aren't system hubs, moons, and even smaller hubs like Alderaan, the operation is only just shuddering to life.  And there are plenty of other random little contingents—a few legions with their Jedi prowling through former Sep space, special operations squads escorting dignitaries and the like—that they haven't been able to contact at all.  Even the Home Guard on Coruscant, for all Commander Fox’s desperate maneuvering, has seen only eight members de-chipped, in choking secrecy.  The Home Guard’s rate of decommissioning is higher than anywhere else in the GAR.

The good news, numerically speaking, is that the rate of de-chipping, at least in the early stages at each barracks, is nearly exponential.  Each trained medic brought into the fold can reach and train multiple other medics and surgical assistants, and each clone fully informed on the situation can spread the word covertly to his own squadmates and, if possible, to batchmates and friends elsewhere, spreading the operation to new barracks in a vast living web.  The GAR is nothing if not well-connected, and discreet.

“Do the math for me, Anakin: How long do you think it will take us to reach half the army, or to have at least thirty percent de-chipped in every large encampment?  Whichever you think will come first.”

Anakin chews his lip, golden eyes flicking sideways as he thinks.  “...Fifteen days, give or take,” he says finally.  “Though I’d want to check that number with Kix.  Thirty percent of the large camps will happen first, if we can get some sterile supply shipments expedited.  The 130th’s head of comms has that plan for hacking capital ships that’ll accelerate our access to the scattered portion, and that's a full quarter of the GAR by our estimates, but they don't have it running yet.”

Obi-Wan taps his fingers absently on the table, and then, when that doesn't satisfy his need for movement, he stands up abruptly to pace, hand in his beard.  He hears what Anakin’s not saying, the implied answer to the implied question in the two options he provided: If they move before they've de-chipped or at least warned a decent percentage of that scattered quarter of the GAR, the Jedi and allied politicians (and even, possibly, civilian evacuees) trapped on spacecraft and in small colonies with those units are almost certainly going to die.  But if they wait too long, everyone dies.  At least a third of each major encampment would be enough to throw a large spanner in the works of any operation the Chancellor could order, to keep danger to major population centers and clone fatalities at a minimum.  The clones in the know have been furiously developing contingency plans: A third of an army can generate a lot of confusion and bureaucratic nonsense, and sabotage a lot of equipment, before it even comes to open combat.  (Obi-Wan doesn't want to ask the clones to fight their mind-controlled brothers unless absolutely necessary—not least for coldly practical reasons, as, given the mood of the de-chipped clones so far, he’s not certain they'd all be willing.)

“Fifteen days,” Obi-Wan repeats.  “Alright.  We’ll discuss it with the commanders and Kix, discuss it with our political allies, but realistically I think that’s the longest we can delay before it becomes an unacceptable risk, given what we now know about his surveillance network.  Hells, if they think there's any chance we can do it sooner, we should.”

“And if he…calls for me again?  Before then?” Anakin asks quietly.  Obi-Wan’s gaze shoots up.  Anakin’s shoulders have slumped inwards again, and his face is beginning to regain the hunted-animal cast from before.

It's not impulse—there's a moment of hesitation, as always—but something close to it has Obi-Wan rounding the table to put his hands on his old apprentice’s shoulders, look him in those predator eyes.  “Then you stall like your life depends on it.  We can…invent an illness, if necessary.  Just do whatever you have to to stay away from that man.”

For a moment, his adult padawan is superimposed with his younger self, towheaded and wary-eyed, and Obi-Wan wishes with all he has that he were speaking to that boy instead of this one.

/B/

Obi-Wan actually flies him to Padme’s that evening.  Kark, Anakin reflects a little hysterically, what is the universe coming to?  His old master is planning on digging through the news archives and their compiled evidence all night, reevaluating their entire Sith investigation in light of this central revelation, and while he doesn't say it directly, Anakin knows he's worried about letting his old padawan be alone right now.

Anakin has calmed down a lot—he still feels nauseous and his flesh hand keeps betraying him with tremors that won't abate—but his heart isn't beating out of his chest anymore, and the Force is no longer crushing in on him with the malignant pressure of the deep sea.

This is also a good thing because Padme, usually so much more calm than him, nearly has a panic attack herself when they tell her (after a thorough sweep for every kind of bug in existence, which catches three, but none of them in range of the living room or bedroom. Padme’s security team is good, luckily).  Palpatine was her mentor, a onetime friend even though they’ve been on the outs for most of the war; she's spent almost as much time alone with him as Anakin.  She helped put him in his current position.  “I trusted him,” she says, wild-eyed and sallow.  “All that time he was looking at me and I thought I knew what was behind the eyes—I’ve had him in my home so many times—he knows my whole family, Ani, he knows my baby niece—”

Anakin hugs her and makes her tea.  He’s distantly surprised to note that this helps him calm down more than anything else has.  (Though he still can't bring himself to take off the leg braces.)  Then they manage to cuddle in silence for about ten minutes before giving in to their mutual coping mechanism of frantic strategizing.  Neither of them manages to sleep that night, but at least they're having parallel crises between very soft, expensive sheets.

The next morning, two hours before sunrise, both of their comms buzz three times in sync, indicating that Obi-Wan is calling for the risky but necessary meeting the lead Coruscant-bound conspirators agreed to hold as soon as any of them figured out who the Sith Lord was.  This is not the sort of information you let rest with just a handful of murderable people for longer than necessary, but it's also not the type that you share over comms.  They can get away with it once, in the clone barracks: the one place Anakin, Obi-Wan, Ahsoka, and Barriss; Rex, Cody, Kix, and the rest of their team; and Padme and her doubles all visit regularly or could reasonably make plans to visit on short notice.

As a politician working to enfranchise and resettle the GAR, Padme has a standing strategy meeting, doubling as a minor PR stunt, with barracks command every two weeks; no one will see anything suspicious in her moving her next visit a few days sooner on her official senate calendar, as she does now.  Anakin makes sure to wait an hour before notifying the Temple’s now half-defunct military affairs scheduling office that he and Ahsoka will be at the barracks for much of the day, after Ahsoka’s morning classes and before Anakin’s evening shift on transportation comms, approving and logging ships entering and leaving the Temple’s airspace.  This is not much of a deviation from his ordinary schedule either, as he’s been back and forth basically every other day, working with Kix to get the right drug and supply shipments out to the right planets from the right planets, under the guise of strong-arming wholesalers into supplying the overflowing Coruscant barracks at reasonable prices.  He’s been doing this too, of course, as have many other Jedi concerned about their battalions, but after two years of doing that same job with lightyears of distance diminishing his intimidation factor, across stretched-thin supply lines and through layers and layers of red tape, it doesn't take nearly as much time as he's implied to his superiors.

And so it is that, around noon, the counter-conspirators (or really the core, when you include the other seventy thousand and counting) match grim faces with shocked ones around a plasteel table under flickering fluorescent lights.  They're not in the main command center or the officer barracks—Cody’s tech men have confirmed that those are bugged six ways from Sarrinsday—but rather the gear and waiting area outside one of the shooting ranges open to all ranks.  Sidearms and plasma cannons line the halfheartedly whitewashed concrete walls, hanging from neat rows of pegs, and the table takes up much of the inner half of the room, large enough for various weapons to be arrayed over it, but cleared for this meeting.  The wall to the left when entering is transparisteel from stomach level up, allowing them to look out on the lanes, just thin empty corridors with scorched back walls now that the simulators are dormant.  Anakin and Ahsoka were the first non-clones to arrive; the two privates who were using the lanes when they came in nearly caused a friendly fire incident, they startled so badly.  Their looks as they scurried out were nervous but knowing.

“The Chancellor,” Rex repeats with a deceptively blank face.  “So you're telling me—are you telling me it wasn't even a real war?”  His horror, his rage, is streaming out into the Force around him like water from a punctured vase.

“It was real for the Separatist Senate, at least,” Padme says with a haunted tone.  “I've talked to them, eventually they would've fought anyway, I think, but—probably not with droids, they wouldn't have thought of it without the support of the banking clans, and their involvement was almost certainly manipulated.  And—”  She cuts herself off, but they all know what she’s thinking.  The clones would never have been commissioned without this great conspiracy.

“All that suffering,” Cody says quietly, “and for what.”  There’s a moment of silence, and then he straightens uncomfortably as if surprised they all heard him.  He clears his throat.  “General Kenobi, you can confirm this intelligence?”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan says.  “I've looked back through every false lead we followed, every time the credit trail disappeared or someone died unexpectedly, and only someone in the Chancellor’s office would have had the authority and access to wipe a vast number of those records, or to register the corporations that really only exist as highly illegal skeletons.  Frankly, I’m appalled that we didn't notice it before, but, well….”  In hindsight, it’s so simple as to be laughable, and yet at the same time it’s so outlandish that one would have to be a dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist to even consider it.  What chancellor divides and devastates his own country?  Impoverishes his own republic, feeding it its own tail like a snake?  The media is under the impression that the Chancellor’s personal fortune has been nearly expended on battle-saving supply runs and lifesaving aid.  It all seems so absurdly self-destructive—until you notice the spaces between the stars, the checks from politicians and guerillas and pimps addressed to people and companies that don't exist, and you start to see the shape of the other accounts that must have ten times the credits pouring in.

Ahsoka hunches forward with her brow markings furrowed, resting her crossed arms against her stomach rather than the table.  “I just don't understand how he could've gotten away with this.  I mean, I saw it, I lived through it, but I always thought the Chancellor was just a—a talented opportunist.”  (She’s been spending too much time with Obi-Wan, Anakin reflects.)  “How do you even come up with and execute a plan on that scale?  What kind of person thinks like that?  And how’s it possible that there were no weak links?”

“Padme and I were talking about this last night,” Anakin muses with a kind of hollow feeling, not catching the raised eyebrows exchanged by Ahsoka and Fives.  “It sort of makes sense from the ways he would talk about things.  I know he was lying to me the whole time, but the ways in which he chose to lie were revealing.  As well as the whole shape of his plan.”

“Yes,” Padme picks up, “the thing is, speaking as a politician, no one should really be able to pull off what he did.  The galaxy is such a complicated place, made up of so many complex individuals, so many planets, so many species and cultures and political structures that most days, we in the Senate have to fight tooth and nail even to push a law through that everyone already basically agrees upon.  So how do you make people more likely to act alike, to act more predictable?  You force them to be constantly reacting to something, give them no time to act on their own initiative, introduce new factors.  You make them scared, and you absolve them of the responsibility of ensuring their own safety.”

Obi-Wan is nodding along.  “You're right.  We Jedi Generals may have complained constantly about red tape and political deadlocks, but from a broader historical perspective, the amount of actual consensus in the Senate for the past two years has been downright extraordinary.  That many delegates being willing to grant emergency powers to a powerful Core world rival?  Unheard of.”

“Exactly,” Padme says.  “And once you've taken advantage of their reactions to centralize power, how do you extend that reach, export uniformity of thought and feeling across the galaxy?  You target the people at the edges, the ones whose experiences and opinions are most different from yours.”

“You collapse the governments and devastate the infrastructure of the Mid and Outer Rims, so it all has to be rebuilt on Corrie designs with Corrie credits,” Anakin finishes for her.  “And I bet the Jedi didn't see it coming because in a lot of ways he was thinking like a Jedi.  We like uniformity.  We like imposing rational moral systems on people that ensure the greatest happiness for the greatest number, but that line of thinking assumes the same conditions will create happiness for everyone, and anyone who isn't made happy under those conditions is an aberration.  The Code has no room for that impulse to say maybe two plus two is five today, kriff it.  I don't want you to make me happy; I don't want you to make me anything.”

They live by a Code that they don't deviate from, and they don't understand or they feel contempt for anyone who would act otherwise.  Sure, Anakin wouldn't say the Code isn't ridiculously complex if you really look into the history; it actually leaves room for all sorts of complexities, but that's not the way they've been teaching it for the last few centuries.  He knows Barriss has some more specific complaints about the modern dogma, as he’s not much of a theologian himself, but you don't grow up in a religious order for a decade and not notice some inconsistencies.

That's the kind of education that makes people predictable, and predictability means vulnerability to a canny old strategist like Palpatine.

Barriss nods fiercely in agreement with this characterization, side-eyeing Obi-Wan as if daring him to quibble.  “He’s a terrible Darksider, really, if I have learned anything from my research.  The impulse to centralize, to impose uniformity, is not a properly Dark impulse, and neither is all of this—this cold-blooded political puppeteering.  We are supposed to be about strength and passion.”

“He wants to divide people into categories and order who has access to power, who has license for violence, based on his own ability to predict and influence them,” Anakin continues.  “Why do you think he built one army and grew another, when having a draft army that brings in a wide cross-section of Republic society would sow suffering faster, on a wider scale?  One man multiplied by three million and brought up under identical circumstances of repression is so much more predictable than a regular army, especially since he clearly didn't expect the men’s level of individuality.  If he thought he could get away with two droid armies without minimizing the overall suffering too much, I bet he would have gone that way.”  Anakin shakes his head in disgust.  “Stars, he's even less of a fucking Sith than I am.”

Rex leans forward suddenly, resting his forearms on the table.  “Begging your pardon, General,” he says, “but I think there’ll be more than enough time to figure out how this happened after we’ve put this hut’uun traitor in the ground.  So how are we killing him.”  It’s not a question.  His consonants hiss around the edges of his teeth, and the force of his sense of betrayal stains that whole side of the room so wine-bitter it's hard to look at.  Cody, Kix, and Fives are starting to bleed similar rage, but they're still processing, still reeling in disbelief; Rex’s hand was already clenching like he was reaching for a knife the moment the damning name crossed Padme’s lips.

“Carefully,” says Obi-Wan drily.  “And as soon as possible.”

Anakin feels ill.  And it is at this moment, of course, that his comm rings.  There are only five people who can override the silencing on his comm in this mode, and four of them are in the room with him.

All the blood immediately drains from his face.  Padme, sat to his right, glances at his wrist and gasps, fist darting up over her mouth, and if Anakin were aware enough to note everyone else's reactions, he’d know they've put together what that means.  But at the moment, his vision is tunneling in on the blinking green light, on the name displayed, the dial tone twinned by a high-pitched ringing in his ears.

Against a backdrop of dead silence, he lets it ring out.  A few seconds later, the light blinks yellow to indicate that someone is leaving a message.

From his left side, under the table, Ahsoka grabs his hand.

Finally, after a long interlude of silence, Obi-Wan clears his throat.  “As I was saying.  Carefully, and very quickly.”

/B/

The Chancellor calls again, later that day, and then again the next morning when he and Obi-Wan are detouring through the Hall of Fountains on their way to Obi-Wan’s council meeting and Anakin’s physical therapy; at that point Anakin feels forced to pick up to avoid confirming the man’s suspicions, which are already almost certainly raised.  Anakin is no actor, but this time, the Force is with them: Between the genuine, blind panic seizing his lungs and Obi-Wan’s quick thinking—appreciated more after the fact than in the moment—in throwing a handful of fine sand from the nearest fountain in his face, he thinks his performance sufficient to convince even a terrifying Sith Lord that he’s truly, horrifically sick.

(Cough, cough!) “Yes, it—” (cough, hack) “started coming on just after the—” (wheeeze) “opera, I really—” (cough) “hope you didn't—” (sneeze) “catch it—” Anakin gasps out.  (Sneeze, sneeze, sneeze!)

“Oh, that's perfectly alright, my boy,” the Chancellor’s smooth tenor patters over the commlink, and something in Anakin shrivels at the way cold terror mixes with familiarity.  He keeps expecting to hear something nefarious in that voice, to sense its true malignance, and yet the Chancellor sounds the same as he ever has: warm, fatherly, a bit tinny over the speakers.  “I’ve been in fine fettle myself, don't you fret.  I was actually hoping you could join me at Senator Atanna’s upcoming charity gala—I know you have an interest in the refugee crisis in the Thanium sector.  But I suppose it is not to be.”

And he sounds so disappointed, then, offering his aid to a cause Anakin actually cares about, that for a wild moment Anakin’s throat fills with the urge to apologize, to accept the invitation, to warn him that they know and they're going to kill him and he has to run—

Horrified, he actually slaps a hand to his mouth to hold the words in.  Luckily, another coughing fit covers the pause, and then Obi-Wan has his flesh wrist in a death grip and is mouthing “End the call!” with white showing all around his irises.

Holding eye contact, he manages one deep-ish breath, and the words stop pressing so insistently on his tongue.  Instead: “I’m—” (hack, hack) “really sorry, Chancellor, I wish—” he manages before his voice gives out into a truly prodigious fit of hacking and sputtering.

“No, no, I will hear no apologies.  You just focus on getting well, my boy.  With how well you acquitted yourself during that final campaign, I’m amazed your poor system didn't give up the ghost sooner!”  He chuckles—but is it Anakin’s imagination, or was there an edge of annoyance to that last compliment?  No, he's just convincing himself due to what he knows now, hearing things.  “I’ll have my secretary send you something, perhaps order you a nice soup.  Though I do hope the Temple security lets it through, hmm.”  He trails off meaningfully.  There’s nothing for it but for Anakin to cough out “Thank—you—”

“Oh, nonsense, it's the least I can do.  Get well soon!”  And with that, the call cuts off, though neither Anakin nor Obi-Wan dares to say anything until Anakin, still wheezing, has pulled his comm off his wrist and toggled the microphone volume to zero, then shut the comm all the way off for good measure.

Obi-Wan looks vaguely nauseous.  At the same moment, they both finally gather their wits, and Anakin blurts out “Are we sure it’s really him” just as Obi-Wan says “You cannot eat that soup,” and then Anakin blushes as his brain catches up to his tongue.

Yes, it's him.  Of course it’s him, Anakin has seen the evidence, has felt the way the Dark pulsed around the old politician before he thickened his shields against Anakin’s probing.  And yet the thought of the Chancellor dying, of losing another person he cares about, who offered a friendly ear all through his childhood when things got hard—it still makes his throat clog and his breath hitch with anticipated grief.

And now Obi-Wan is looking at him with something suspiciously like pity, and suddenly Anakin needs to be anywhere but here.  He takes one stumbling step back—still wearing the braces, the physical therapist would've skinned him alive if he'd made it to the appointment anyways—and then strides back the way they came as quickly as his aching legs can manage.  He half expects Obi-Wan to follow, and can't tell if he's glad or angry when he arrives at his apartment unaccompanied.

/B/

An unfortunate side effect of this performance, he realizes after he’s finished freaking out like a little kid, is that now he can't really leave the Temple at all for at least four or five days, as the Chancellor almost certainly has access to cameras or informants covering every exit of the building.  Really, it's probably best if he doesn't leave his rooms, in case that network extends inside the Temple, and he should drag out the excuse for a tenday at least.

This means the next fourteen days pass excruciatingly slowly, for all that they sort of blur together from the other end.  He spends most of this time asleep, or on the couch tinkering with spare parts and trying not to snap at Ahsoka for leaving her laundry everywhere.  He comms Padme until their conversation has well and truly dried up and she gets genuinely sick of him, and then he wanders around, taking long showers to keep from comming her again.  While he does get the most crucial surgical shipments expedited, he knows he's not doing as much to help with the de-chipping process as he could be.  It makes his skin itch.

On the upside, all this laziness means that his legs are finally getting the rest they need, and Ahsoka bugs him into mostly keeping up with his mobility exercises, so he can actually walk without pain for decent stretches by the time Obi-Wan and Rex think it’s safe for him to fake a recovery.  (She shouldn't have to do that, he thinks, and fights back uncomfortable memories of being very small in a silent apartment, heating frozen dinners while the top shelf of Qui-Gon’s plants wilted beyond his reach.)

With only three days to go, Obi-Wan comes over to tell him the plan they've all drafted without his input.  Anakin gets angry mostly from force of habit before realizing he actually couldn’t care less.  On the morning of, at six standard, Obi-Wan wakes him to ask if he wants to come along to present their evidence to the Council, hopefully too late for any traitor to warn the—him, their target.  Anakin instead spends this last hour and a half staring at the door, telling himself over and over that it has to happen until he can almost, almost believe it.  Then he stands up and locks eyes with Ahsoka, who’s become wary and quiet in a way he hates, and they walk to the hangar for a speeder.  After all, he reflects darkly, who even is he if he’s not fighting a war he doesn't believe in?

/B/

The funniest part, when Anakin lets himself think any of this is funny, is that Obi-Wan actually makes an appointment for it with the Chancellor’s secretary.  Or rather, not an appointment in advance, but he saunters up to the secretary’s secretary at their desk in the lobby, smiles his winningest smile, and asks if he and Anakin could bring Rex and a small squadron of men up at nine standard this morning, ostensibly to plead their case straight to power about the conditions in Coruscant’s hub barracks and the need to disband and resettle the army.  Their chances of really fooling the old man are slim to none, but he also can’t really afford to drop his act until he’s certain about theirs, and even a half-second of confusion might give them the upper hand.

Given what they know, it feels rather ominous that Senate security didn't object to the clones entering the premises armed, but at the same time, it’s one of the best signs they could’ve hoped for, since it has to mean the Chancellor hasn’t noticed the GAR’s mass de-chipping.  He mustn’t have; after all, reason dictates that he would’ve activated them as soon as he caught wind, and they aren’t all dead yet.  He’s made the fundamental mistake they all hoped he’d make: He’s underestimated both the clones’ independence and their cohesion.  No other body of people this large could have pulled off such an operation without tripping any alarms, but for the clones, this was just an extension and adaptation of systems they employed for the entire war.  The strength of the clones’ bonds of mutual loyalty and the cleverness behind their habits of absolute secrecy are not things it would occur to the Chancellor to consider, Anakin and Padme concluded on that first night when they were wondering how they were still breathing.  Hopefully.

The secretary’s secretary blusters about the short notice and brings in their manager, who brings in his manager, but all three of them are savvy enough to know that these are war heroes to whom it would look very bad to deny an audience, even if General Skywalker weren't the Chancellor’s personal friend.  They hem and haw and bargain a bit, and finally consent as long as they can push the time back to ten.

What this means in the interim is that instead of marching straight through the doors in dramatic military fashion, their force is reduced first to loitering in a foyer under the confused gaze of several janitor droids for ninety minutes, and now to milling about the hallway outside the Chancellor’s office for another ten or so, waiting for the man himself to see fit to buzz them in.  Half the clones are kicking absently at the plush red carpet, blasters innocent in their holsters, trying to identify all the security cameras while looking as casual as possible.  Fives is still holding the caf he somehow bullied the secretaries into getting him.  Sergeant Jesper in the back corner is whistling.

The wait time is not going well for Anakin.  His heart feels like it’s going to beat out of his chest, and his sweaty robes have practically adhered to his back. Ahsoka has already split off for her own mission, which is a bright spot in all aspects except that she’s not here to distract him with sarcastic remarks.  Barriss and Luminara should have arrived a few hours ago on Rattatack, home to the largest clone enclave they were unable to reach, and convinced the commanders to initiate mass quarantine procedures.  Obi-Wan and Rex are standing close by, Obi-Wan shooting him worried glances every thirty seconds or so, but he certainly wouldn't feel comfortable sharing his doubts with either of them.  Rex’s rage at the Chancellor is so obviously deep and righteous that it makes him feel desperately guilty for his hesitation, and Obi-Wan is…Obi-Wan.

In the absence of someone to talk to, the Jedi way is to fall back on trained structures of thought, principles based in theology, to reason through a problem with the support of a framework.  But in his experience, the Jedi way is much more useful for determining the right course of action than for following it.  The Jedi way in this situation, recognizing as he already does the righteousness of this mission, would be to release his feelings about it to the Force.  There is no emotion, there is peace.

…Peace is a lie, there is only passion.

Well, that’s certainly the case today.

But passion isn't just about strong emotion, it's also about desire.  What does he actually want here?

He does want justice.  For the clones, for the galaxy.  He wants Padme to feel safe again.  He wants to feel safe again, still reeling from a betrayal he’s really barely processed.  He wants the people he cares about to be safe.  And he knows the Chancellor is a mass murderer on a scale that is hard to even conceptualize, the greatest threat you could possibly imagine to everyone and everything he needs to protect.

…And yet when he was eleven, he went through a phase where he got really into hyperlanes—the history, theory, engineering—and he talked the ear off anyone who would listen until his engineering teachers stopped calling on him in classes, and one boy he thought he’d gotten close to told him flat-out to his face that he was annoying and should stop talking to him.  Even Obi-Wan, who held out the longest of anyone, stopped asking questions and started not-so-subtly changing the subject.  Only one person in his life never seemed to get tired of listening.

And when he was sixteen, he secretly entered a swoop tournament, a really big one, and won first place, which was an especially amazing feeling at a time when he didn't really feel he was doing anything right in the Temple.  He and Obi-Wan had been fighting more and more, and it scared him for a lot of reasons.  And of course Obi-Wan didn't and couldn't know he was in the tournament, so he was expecting to step offstage and quietly leave the mechanic’s garage the rowdy “ceremony” was being hosted in with his eyes down and his medal hidden in his pocket.  But instead, he looked down, and somehow there was the Chancellor of the Republic, wearing fake round-rimmed spectacles and casual clothing, beaming and clapping for him.

Yes, he knows now that it was all fake.  It must have been.  The Chancellor often made him uncomfortable, too, with his subtle insults to the Jedi and Obi-Wan that Anakin (sometimes) dismissed as misunderstandings.  More often than not, as he told Obi-Wan, he did leave the Chancellor’s office feeling angry and discouraged, though until the opera he always thought that was just because the Chancellor let him vent.  But even if the Chancellor’s affections were all counterfeit, the warm, smooth shell of a rotten egg, that doesn't change the way they made Anakin feel in the moment.

His first reaction to that thought is a hot blooming of self-contempt, which is not the openminded consideration he’s been trying to cultivate.  It’s okay to be guided by your emotions, he reminds himself.  It’s okay to desire things, for yourself and for others.  He remembers how Barriss suggested that if your head is on straight about right and wrong, often your emotions and desires will balance themselves out, just as they did with—with his mom, back then.  What he’s dealing with now is essentially just a more frustrating version of that, isn't it?

The Sith would say to know what he wants.  He wants the Chancellor out of his life, out of everyone’s lives, and he doesn't want to kill him.  Really, he just doesn't want to do any more grieving.  But grief is unavoidable; grief stares him down, taunting, from the shadows of every pathway.

The Jedi teach that desire stems from a fear of loss.  To accept the inevitability of loss is to be freed from desire and from fear.  Anakin sometimes feels as if loss has shadowed his steps from his first breath, mantling on his neck like a vulture, looming like a distant wave.  It terrifies him; it makes him feel helpless.  Accepting the inevitability of anything goes against his deepest-graven instinct: to fight, to fight, to fight again, if only in the privacy of your own head.

…But you can brace for a wave, can't you?  Just because you know the wave will come regardless doesn't mean you should go limp and let it hit you.  You can build a raft.  You can dig your feet in the sand.  You can dive for the bottom and let as much of its force as possible pass over your head—

It occurs to him then.  The idea is so simple, he’s not sure how he never thought of it until now.  But really, of course he never thought of it.  It goes against everything he's ever believed of himself.

But he thinks of going into that room, and the Force bleeds with the premonition of something far worse than death.

Anakin licks his lips and steps forward.

“I can't—Obi-Wan, I don't think I should go in there.”

Obi-Wan’s focus whips toward him, surprise scrawled across his features.  “You what?”

Stars, he’s terrified even thinking of letting Obi-Wan into that room without him.  But.… “Iya sa do ti-toki che ren,” he says quietly to himself in its original tongue, testing out the words.  There is a time for rain.

Beyond all his fear, all around him and stirring it into murky turbulence, the Force rings with rightness at the edge of his hearing.

“What was that, young one?”  Obi-Wan steps closer, shields tight against the monster next door, but leaking surprise across the bond like a sieve.

“I don't—I don't think I can trust myself with—Obi-Wan, we don't know what he could've done to me,” he realizes as he says it.  “We don't—and even if he hasn't, I still.”

He can't bring himself to finish.

There are emotions it is appropriate to allow to move through you, to accept and exhaust and allow to pass away.  Anger.  Fear.  Pride.  Shame.  Even joy isn't meant to last forever, as much as it should be fully relished when and where it sees fit to bloom.

Love, for Anakin, can never be one of them.  For better or for worse, no matter how unearned, he can't just stop feeling it.

Sometimes, the Dark Side is about living with total freedom, pursuing one’s desires, letting your emotions carry you to vindication.  But sometimes, as he once told Barriss (hypocrite that he is), the Dark Side is about getting out of your own way.

“If you need me,” he says slowly.  “If you need me, you call.  And I’ll be right out here.”

When he first spoke up, Obi-Wan’s eyebrows looked to be straining to escape his forehead.  But now, at length, Obi-Wan nods, a twinge of relief vibrating out into the Force around him.  “Hmm, you're right, of course, I think that's wise.  I just wouldn't have expected it—but yes, it's likely for the best given both the possibility that he implanted some sort of suggestion in your mind and the state of your legs, don’t think I’ve forgotten them.  And it’s better to have a Jedi in the hall keeping watch for reinforcements than one of the men.”

Despite these words, he feels it flicker across the Force like a tongue of lightning—Obi-Wan’s doubt, the fear of what he'll now be facing alone—and immediately regrets his decision.  It's a horrible choice.  Because even if Obi-Wan will be okay, most likely, probably (right?), at least a few of the clones are about to die, when maybe his presence could prevent it.  A big maybe—limiting collateral damage in a battle like this is extremely difficult—but he'll never know if he stays out here.

It feels like horrible cowardice, too, huddling out here alone while others dash into the fray.  It goes against every instinct he's ever built or rebuilt since becoming a Jedi and then joining a war.  What will they think of him, the Council, the Jedi, his wife, when they hear that he was here and did not fight?  And how is it that the coward’s way feels harder than running into danger?

His old master hesitates a moment, then carefully lays his left hand on Anakin’s shoulder.  “I'll keep them safe for you,” he says.  “As best I can.”

“Keep yourself safe too, old man.  Seriously, I’m right here.”

“I know, Padawan.  I’ll see you on the other side.”

And this is when the speaker above Palpatine’s door chimes politely to usher them in.

Rex gives him a surprised look when he sees Anakin peel off to station himself by the door, probably having missed their conversation due to helmet chatter, but then he glances down at the heavy brace still on his left leg and understanding pings through the Force.  He offers a casual salute and readies himself at the head of the column beside Obi-Wan, hands clasped professionally in front of him.  None of the rest of the men question it, either, when they form up behind them.  Fives foists his empty caf cup on him with a grinning wink.

And then the doors slide open, and slide shut, and Anakin is alone in the hallway.

/B/

Palpatine stands when they enter the room in a rustle of layers, gold-flecked half-cape draping demurely over a red-and-white suit that's as plain as a Naboo politician can pull off outside a funeral.  His acolytes might call the movement smooth, debonair; in fact, he reminds Obi-Wan of nothing more than a blood-engorged tick, languid with feeding.  “Master Kenobi!  What an unexpected pleasure!  And the gentlemen of the 212th and 501st—I must say, I do wish you'd made your appointment in advance; I could have booked us a more spacious locality.”

“Chancellor,” Obi-Wan says measuredly.  (Shields up, shields up!)  “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid we're not here for a meeting.”

The Chancellor’s eyes narrow, one gnarled hand drifting toward a cabinet in his desk.  “Ah.  How unfortunate that it must come to this—”

“We're here for a peaceful protest.”

The Chancellor pauses, hand an inch from the handle.  “I’m sorry?”

“Yes, it was Lieutenant Spanner’s idea really,” Obi-Wan tosses out blithely, inventing a clone at random.  (From the way one of Anakin’s men jerks his head up, he might be a bit too good at that.  Whoops.)   “We’re occupying your office as a peaceful clone rights and anti-war protest.  This is, after all, the center of power in the Republic—geospatially, economically, politically—and who better than those with no voice in the democratic process to make a statement in deeds, rather than words?”

As the patter rolls off his tongue, Obi-Wan continues his slow, steady walk toward the Chancellor, not fast enough to spook him, but fast enough to hold his focus.  The room is shaped a bit like a large, curvy figure-eight, with the main desk toward the edge of one bulge and a sitting area in the other, one curved wall mostly a huge transparisteel window and the other minimalist with the exception of a few odd tapestries.  The main door let them in at the bulge with the desk; no other doors are visible, though they surely exist.  His men spread out across the room seemingly at random, some lounging against the walls, some picking up and examining Palpatine’s décor, some sprawling on the plush couch on the other side of the wide office or dropping insouciantly into the chairs in front of the desk (and promptly scooting them just a little farther back).  And some, including Waxer, Boil, and Rex, wander naturally along the curvature of the walls and end up behind Palpatine, peering innocently out the great transparisteel windows at Coruscant beyond.

“Clone bodies are, after all, the bulwark and foundation of the current Republic,” Obi-Wan continues.  He’s only four yards from the desk now, but Palpatine will be hard to get to behind it.  “By filling this space with clone bodies—not insubstantial memorials but living, breathing, inconvenient men—we invert the spatial politics of the war and recontextualize on a viscerally understandable level its excesses, its injustices.  Though of course, it’s the space we're protesting, symbolically.  Not you, Chancellor.  I know you're doing everything you can to get the clone resettlement going, it's just the gridlock in the Senate that keeps their sentient rights suspended in red tape.”

Five feet.  “Come, Chancellor, won't you shake Cody’s hand and show the press you stand with these brave men?”

For a moment, they regard each other across the desk, Obi-Wan wearing his most charming grin, Palpatine’s calculation showing clearly on his bad-plastoid-surgery politician’s face.  For a moment, he considers it.  He takes half a step forward, as if to round the desk.

Then his eyes narrow further.  “You're lying,” he says in a cold voice Obi-Wan has never heard from him before, just as Boil steps forward and takes a point-blank shot at his head.

A burning red line snaps up and deflects it with a zing into the carpet.

Kriff.

Well, it was worth a shot.

Immediately, all across the office, the clones overturn the furniture and start blasting from behind the cover it makes.  Anyone without a blaster-proof table or armchair smacks his bracer, and a Mandalorian-style riot shield extends to cover him.  Obi-Wan himself leaps forward, planting a hand on the desk to vault over it and decapitate this miserable little tick where he stands.

For all that he knows now, it still catches him by surprise, just a bit, when the elderly Chancellor flips back out of reach, sending Waxer and Boil diving to escape the quick-flickering red tongue of his ‘saber.  Obi-Wan has only ever known the Chancellor as a particularly irritating, power-hungry bureaucrat, but his body language now is all wrong; this is another man entirely, limber and jagged-edged.  This is Dooku’s nightmare.  Anakin’s betrayer.

Sidious vaults forward and locks blades crosswise with Obi-Wan, who has to widen his stance in a hurry at the unexpected force of it.  Sidious isn't quite as strong as Dooku, but closer than he should be at half the deceased general's size.  Almost before Obi-Wan’s right foot has finished stepping out, though, Sidious disengages, ducks around the resulting downward strike, and swings at Obi-Wan’s left side.  Obi-Wan pivots and blocks again, attempting as the blades move together to burn Sidious’ fingers where his fairly traditional blade lacks a crossguard, but Sidious leaps away too quickly, ‘saber flicking up as he whirls to block three well-aimed blaster shots.  He drops low to dodge the rest.  Obi-Wan spots a fluttering torn patch in his multilayered half-cape and understands—one of the clones took a careful shot while they were dueling.

The plan is working, then, one developed through a number of instructive experiences fighting Sith as a unit.  Obi-Wan cautiously but relentlessly engages, holding Sidious’s attention; the clones take sporadic shots whenever they can without hurting Obi-Wan; and whenever Obi-Wan has to fall back a step or Sidious tries to get some breathing room, the clones concentrate fire from all directions to keep him from regaining his equilibrium.  Too often, Cody pointed out, the clones and their blasters have been underutilized in fights against Force-sensitive opponents for fear that they might hit their fast-moving, acrobatic generals or else get taken out by ricochets, and due to the perception that any competent Force-sensitive will just brush off the blasterfire regardless.  But a relatively stationary combination of Soresu and Djem So elements diminishes the risk of friendly fire, and the clones’ various shields will protect them from ricochets better than their plasteel armor, new sets of which grew thinner and thinner as the war wore on.  The theory is, if they can keep Sidious’s attention divided between two very different threats, eventually he’ll make a mistake.

Of course, Obi-Wan has no time to reflect on this in any but the vaguest half-formed way, because Sidious is surging forward low to the ground, stabbing upward in a form he doesn't recognize.  It’s vaguely reminiscent of Makashi.  Obi-Wan lets him close, bats it away, and attempts to strike back, only to have to pivot in a hurry again as Sidious’s momentum carries him past his left hip and he almost takes a 'saber to the small of his back.  Thinking quickly, he swaps to a reverse grip and stabs behind his right side, turning that way instead of pivoting left like Sidious would expect, but the man is like smoke, already disengaged and backing up toward the big window, sending a series of blaster shots back at the clones who fired them.  One yelps as it hits his hand on the blaster, still exposed around the shield.  Well, that just won't do.

This time, it’s Obi-Wan who closes quickly, leaping up on the desk and deflecting a few of his own men’s shots into the floor.  He’s trying to disorient Sidious by coming at him from above, but the small-statured Sith is clearly used to fighting taller opponents, and Obi-Wan almost loses a leg for his troubles.  Still, he manages to make Sidious back away from the desk, which is a secondary goal here—he was keeping his lightsaber there, but Obi-Wan isn't sure that was what he was reaching for when they first came in.  If he has some sort of comm device that activates the mind-control chips, they want to keep him as far from it as they can.

They lock blades again, and this time Sidious, who’s put a wall at his back, holds for a moment, shoving brutally.  Obi-Wan grits his teeth.  Past the spitting plasma, he sees yellow eyes narrow, calculating, in a pale, pitted face.

“You know, you were not who I expected, General Kenobi,” Sidious says conversationally, though his breathing betrays that he's at least a bit winded.  “Leading a military coup, against the elected leader of the Republic you swore to defend?  I suppose at last we see the Jedi’s true loyalties.”

Piqued, Obi-Wan manages to shove him back a step, transitioning into a crouching swipe Sidious backflips to evade.  The clones issue another barrage of gunfire, and this time Obi-Wan is forced back a few steps as Sidious bats a series of bolts at him.  And for the first time, he notices something dark and malicious sliding against his mental shields.

“Kind of you to bring up the topic of treason, Chancellor,” Obi-Wan retorts, thickening his defenses even further and controlling his breathing.  “I’m afraid we really came here with some pointed questions about your personal connection to Count Dooku, and your financial ties to the Separatists.”  Experimentally, Obi-Wan feigns overextending just slightly to deflect a bolt, and Sidious lunges again; he rebounds off Obi-Wan’s steady stance but dances back around the downward sweep Obi-Wan hoped to trap him with.  Cue blasterfire again.  It’s like fighting Yoda more than anything.

They circle each other for a moment in the open space between the desk and the sitting area,  Sidious lazily deflecting blasterfire from both sides with a steady stance.  However, his gauzy half-cape is beginning to look rather the worse for wear, and—Obi-Wan does a double-take—it seems like something is wrong with face.  

“Ahh, those are some serious allegations.”  Sidious’s genial tone really doesn't match his new appearance.  “I do hope you have evidence to support them.”

“Yes, in fact, quite the pile of it,” Obi-Wan exaggerates slightly.  A shout from the opposite wall corroborates him: “We all know damn well you're traitorous scum!”

“Brotherkiller!” adds another man, and the whole squad grumbles angrily, popping off more daring shots from behind their shields.

Sidious smirks, ‘saber twirling in steady figure-eights.  “Ah, I see.  I must ask, though: What does dear Anakin think of all this?  Lurking in the hall, tsk, tsk; shall I invite him in?”

Obi-Wan’s lungs freeze in terror as his face boils with rage—and this is the moment that an enormous weight slams against his shields.  It drops him to one knee with a shout, clutching his head, and he only barely regains his equilibrium in time to block Sidious’s overhead strike.

He staggers to his feet quickly, readying for a second blow as best he can amidst the HATE, HATE, TOWERING HATE battering against his shields.  The noxious whirlpool of rage and paranoia is so massive and disorienting, clawing at his weaknesses from every direction, that it takes him precious seconds to notice that the second blow never came.  Fear scythes through him as he whirls around, squinting against the (terrifyingly familiar) pain.

There—frantic movement, a scream.  Sidious leaps high in the air and scythes through another Mandalorian shield; it sparks and dies as plasma cleaves through its wielder.  Horrified, Obi-Wan bursts into a Force-assisted sprint, stumbles over the first body.  He leaps three more before reaching Sidious, who's already cut down four more men.

Sidious pivots in time to block the stab at his back, but it’s put Obi-Wan off-balance, and he’s borne back by a flurry of furious blows and the building agony of the Force around him.  All of a sudden, it’s like the Force in this office is rotting, putrescent, so disgusting Obi-Wan struggles to understand how he didn't sense it before.  Sidious has relaxed his psychic attack significantly, but the atmosphere still makes it almost impossible to focus.  He feels like he’s wading knee-deep in sucking accretions of poisonous mold, burning his lungs on it.

His men are struggling to recover for different but analogous reasons, those who rushed to the aid of their brothers scrambling to get back out of the way of the now fast-moving fight and resume their strategic firing positions.  Four of those downed are still alive, dragging themselves away as fast as possible with missing limbs or bleeding holes in their chests.  Obi-Wan steps back again from one particularly vicious overhead strike, and his foot comes down on something large, hard, and moving—

He falls.  Sidious’s next blow whistles past his face, but the follow-up burns up the length of his right arm after he barely manages to parry.

Absurdly, the wounded clone he’s now lying half on top of squeaks out an apology and almost throws Obi-Wan sideways in his haste to army-crawl away faster.  Obi-Wan turns the momentum into a roll, gains his feet in a low crouch.  But the red glow is stabbing down like lightning.  His burning arm can barely rise to parry—

And then the tables turn again in a deafening arpeggio of shattered transparisteel, as five Councillors crash in through the floor-to-ceiling window on speeders.  Ah, so Ahsoka succeeded in sabotaging the building’s shields.

Plan A, the element of surprise and tricky tactics, didn't work, which means it’s time for plan B: overwhelming force.

/B/

The clones were ready for this; they’ve cleared the center of the office as a staging area, backing up toward the remaining walls that don't have massive holes in them.  Sidious about-faces to face this new threat and takes an opportunistic burn to the left calf from Obi-Wan for disengaging too carelessly.  Grandmaster Yoda, Mace Windu, and Adi Gallia are closing fast in the moderately sized office; Saesee Tiin and Stass Allie clamber out of the smoking wreckage close at their heels.  Sidious regards them for only a half-second before sprinting—but not toward the door behind him.

Abruptly the Force ripples and Rex shouts, “No!  Don't let him get to the—!”

It's too late.  Sidious snatches up the commlink in his open desk drawer.  He hits a button, and enunciates around his panting with chilling smugness: “All forces: Execute Order 66.”

Obi-Wan freezes.  All blasterfire ceases as if a switch has been flipped.

The other Council members, too, skid to a stop to glance at the men uncertainly and then with dawning horror as the blaster barrels slowly swivel their way.

No.  Were they wrong?  The clones are still blank in the Force, perfectly shielded.  Hysteria creeps up his brainstem as he registers a twinge in his gut, as out there in the universe, rapidly, ten—twelve—sixteen bright Jedi lights wink out of this plane of existence.

And…that's it.

As one, every blaster in the room snaps back to Sidious, unleashing a volley of red-hot plasma so fierce and unexpected that Sidious actually takes two hits!  He staggers, but recovers before Obi-Wan can bisect him, his rage and disbelief towering unshielded as a rolling, poisonous miasma.  “Oh, the GAR is happy to execute,” one of Anakin’s favorites—Jesse, he thinks—offers from behind Obi-Wan with a vicious grin in his voice.  “But we're not that big on orders these days.”

Sidious’s yellow eyes are darting around rapidly, eyeing each of the Council members in turn as he backs away step by step, deflecting blaster bolts without looking.  The Council handles the ricochets just as casually.  They spread out into a wide arc, hemming him in behind his desk, and begin the slow, deliberate stalking pattern they used against Pong Krell.  This time, Obi-Wan joins them, slipping into an open space between Adi and Saesee.  Saesee glances briefly at him and winces, sending a brief pulse of concern that puffs away some of the Force’s suffocating poison.  Obi-Wan glances down to find that a not inconsiderable chunk of his outer bicep is missing.

So that's why it’s hard to raise his arm.  He clicks his tongue, vexed, and switches to a two-handed grip, reluctantly preparing to take a support role unless pressed.

Sidious speaks up suddenly, then, eyes roving up and down their line.  “And what if I surrender?  Would you arrest me?”

This brings the line to a pause, and Obi-Wan’s heart jumps to his throat as he feels them consider it, Yoda and Mace most of all.  They argued for hours about this.  Will Yoda go back on his resolution now, right at the crucial moment?

No.  The Grandmaster’s ears droop unhappily, but he resets his stance.  “Sorry, I am.  No surrendering, will there be.”

Sidious’s surprise is tangible at that.  They resume closing in, the clones and their blasters prowling off the walls behind them.  Sidious tests Yoda’s guard first, resentment pooling in the Force like rotten blood, and practically bounces off Yoda’s calm, ruthless deflection and riposte.  He zeroes in on Stass Allie next, and does nearly overwhelm her with several jabs of that odd, acrobatic style, but Mace strides in from his left like a tank with no weaknesses and he’s forced on the retreat again, taking another burn to the shoulder for his troubles from Master Allie.  Another of the men shouts then as a ricochet hits him in the foot, but on the whole, they’re still looking better than Sidious.  His tailored half-cape is positively in shambles, strips of blood-spattered tulle straggling across his heaving shoulders as he backs toward the wall, glaring poison at his enemies.

“You’re dead if you kill me, you know,” he finally says in a croaking voice devoid of his usual bonne humeur.  “The rabble of this planet don't know what a Sith is.  They think the Jedi are powermongering warlocks or spice-heads at best; they think the clones are barely sentient.  What do you think you'll accomplish here, besides damning your order to a thousand-year holocaust?”

“A pessimist, you are,” Yoda replies calmly.

Sidious’s mouth curls up crooked.  “And look how it’s served me.”

“Hrmm,” says Yoda.  “Look, indeed.”

The Councillors pad forward, twelve feet away, ten feet.  They’re close enough now that their ‘sabers are casting faint multicolored shadows of Sidious on the curved wall behind him.  And then Saesee and Mace are forced to split around the desk.

Sidious springs into an improbable lunge over the desk, sliding like smoke between Saesee’s ‘saber above him and Mace’s under him.  He stabs a clone through the chest and makes a break for the door.

/B/

But backing up slightly:

Even though he was expecting it, Anakin startled when the first muffled sounds of violence made it through the wall of the Chancellor’s office.  In fact, he almost sprinted in on instinct to defend the Chancellor, and then felt desperately guilty as soon as his brain caught up to his body.  That’s when he put his back to the wall and sat on his hands to avoid doing something he’d regret.

He didn't notice it until he was alone in the hallway, but quiet music is playing from tastefully hidden speakers near the ceiling.  Not the Chancellor’s preferred Corellian or Mon’Cal classical music; no, this is more like mellow jazz.  The type of music that might be played on a long hoverlift ride up to a planet-anchored spacefleet station.  He thinks the incongruity of it might be making his nausea worse.  He hasn't felt this much dread and sorrow before a battle since he was a padawan just given his first command, and a part of him wants to die from shame.

The violent noises are getting louder, and it kind of feels like the fight is taking too long.  Is it taking too long?  He repositions to his right until he’s just beside the doorway.  He hears the great crunching and tinkling of transparisteel that must signal the arrival of the High Council.  At that point, there's a pause in the blasterfire that almost has Anakin jumping to his feet, but then it resumes, and he lowers himself back down with all his muscles still tense, unconsciously chewing the nails on his remaining hand.  Half the Council is in there.  They can handle it.  Everything is still going according to plan.

He’s got a hangnail between his teeth when he startles at a pained shout from one of his men, accidentally ripping a small gash in his finger.  Hissing, he shoves both hands back under his thighs.  The music tinkles on merrily.  Is the fighting getting louder?  Yes, actually, it sounds like it's getting closer to the doors.  Then away from the doors.  Then towards them again?  Oh kriff.  Oh kriff.  Okay.

Anakin gets his feet under him and starts to raise himself to a ready crouch, facing the doorway with his right shoulder against the wall, resting but vigilant.  Only his left leg throbs viciously when he bends it that far, protesting the weight and the uncomfortable tension of the metal brace, so, heart in his throat, he readjusts to lean more of his weight on the wall and straighten that currently plasteel-reinforced leg out in front of him.

And then the doors fly open, and the Chancellor dashes through them, turning back in the same moment to prepare to parry Mace Windu stabbing from his right side and duck Obi-Wan’s ‘saber swung from behind at his head.

/B/

…And here's the thing.

Attention is a finite resource, no matter how powerful the Force user, no matter how canny.  Sheev Palpatine has just fought his way out of a kill box, tracking three hundred different variables at once to evade or deflect every blaster bolt and ‘saber swing.  He is tired, and rather old, and he didn't get to finish his morning caf before this irritating melee, and he was surprised twice in the space of two minutes—not at all something he is accustomed to—and more than forty percent of his plans have just collapsed around his ears with the revelation that the control chips, or at least enough of them, aren't working.

He's not absentminded, as he retreats out the door, oh no.  Sidious is never absentminded.  But he is perhaps a little ahead of himself.  He's already evaluating changes and reconstructing plans on the fly in his head.  He's also boiling at the humiliation that's just taken place, at the wasted effort, and at the unbelievable prospect that he's just been outwitted.

And sure, the Skywalker boy’s Force presence is quite powerful; from a real master like Sidious, he could never fully, truly shield it.  He briefly registered it earlier, noting it as an oddity and a potential opportunity.  But here’s the thing: Darth Sidious has spent a lot of time with Anakin Skywalker.  And so it follows that he's gotten perhaps a little bit used to that blinding nuclear presence.  Somewhat inured to it even.

All of this to say:

/B/

Sidious trips.

And then immediately sprouts a third eye, as Mace Windu puts his 'saber through his brain.

For a beat, the whole office and adjoining hallway are silent.

And then, “Fucking Sith hells!” Anakin yelps, curling up to grasp at his ankle.  “Ow, holy sithspit, my fucking leg!”